Developers Outside North America & Western Europe - Developer Tax

I asked five different AI coding tools to help me integrate a payment API. All five gave me Stripe code. I needed Flutterwave. I am a developer in Kampala, Uganda. My clients are businesses in East Africa. Their customers pay with mobile money. Stripe is not available for direct merchant use in Uganda. It has never been available. And yet every AI coding assistant I tried treated it as the obvious, default, only answer. This is not a small inconvenience. Payment integration is where bugs have real financial consequences. When an AI tool generates confident, well-formatted, completely wrong code for your market, you do not just discard it. You read it. You parse it. You figure out what it assumed and why. You search for the documentation the tool should have known. You re-engineer. You try again. That cycle costs time. For a solo developer or a small agency, it costs money. And over months and years, it costs something harder to name: the slow accumulation of evidence that the tools of your trade were built for someone else. I have been building software from Kampala for years. I love what I do. And I have spent a significant portion of that time translating my context into a form that AI tools were trained to understand, because they were not trained on my market, my APIs, my infrastructure, or my users. I started calling this the Developer Tax. It is not a metaphor. It is real overhead, paid in hours, in errors, in the extra cognitive work of bridging the gap between what the tool knows and what you actually need. Over the next few weeks I am going to document it properly. The data, the evidence, the specific failure modes, and what we can do about it. I am also building something to measure it and make it visible. The project is called Unpaved. Because that is where most of the world's developers actually work. If you build software outside of North America and Western Europe, I want to hear from you. What does your Developer Tax look like?