The original title is: "An SBOM Proves What You Installed. It Can't Prove You Should Have."

Short summary

SBOMs and post-install CVE scans only show what resolved, not whether those packages should have been trusted. AI coding agents propose dependencies with the same flat confidence whether names are real, hallucinated, or one-letter typosquats—and malicious packages registered yesterday have no CVEs yet. This post provides supply_chain_gate.py, a pre-install provenance gate using edit-distance against a baseline to catch typosquats before npm install runs.

• •SBOMs record what resolved; they don't answer whether packages should be trusted
• •AI agents propose dependencies with equal confidence regardless of whether names are real, hallucinated, or typosquats
• •Pre-install gates keyed on baseline provenance can catch suspicious packages before postinstall hooks execute

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.