Developers pushed code to GitHub 17.9 billion times in the 12 months covered by the platform’s 2026 Octoverse report—more than in 2024 and 2025 combined. Commits across public and private repositories reached 34.3 billion, while merged pull requests topped 1.3 billion, averaging 3.5 million a day.

GitHub links the surge to developers’ growing use of AI agents alongside advances in models and the tools built around them. Among repositories created this year, those with an agent configuration file recorded eight times as many commits on average as new repositories without one.

The report also points to a rapid change in pull-request workflows. In September, more than 40% of pull requests began with an agent’s first draft, up from 17% in March. GitHub says that amounted to 110 million agent-started pull requests in September, around six times March’s volume. By September, 90% of agent-involved pull requests had been merged, compared with about 86% of pull requests without detected agent involvement.

Use of GitHub Copilot’s agentic features is also increasing: 55% of its monthly active users used them, compared with 35% a year earlier. Copilot cloud agent, which can work independently on an assigned task, grew 230% year over year, according to the report.

Developers are also choosing among more models. In September, 61% of GitHub Copilot users who selected a model themselves used more than one, up from 50% four months earlier. Paid-plan users used 47 distinct models that month, compared with 29 in May. Of developer-selected requests, 38% went to general-purpose models, 37% to models for deep reasoning and planning, and 25% to fast, lightweight models.

GitHub says its community now includes more than 225 million developers. The United States and India remained the largest communities, with 38.3 million and 32 million developers, respectively, in September 2026. Brazil added 3.28 million developers during the year, the third-largest national increase.

The report also examines public repositories by industry for the first time, using a classification based on the North American Industry Classification System. Repositories serving mining, construction, health care, and agriculture have each grown several times over since 2022. Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction grew roughly 65 times from its 2022 baseline, while administrative and support services and construction grew 17 to 18 times.

GitHub’s figures show AI activity varies across sectors. More than four in 10 sampled repositories in administrative and support services, mining, health care, and agriculture mentioned AI, but fewer than 3% had pull requests opened by agents. Construction stood out: about 9% of repositories in the sector had agent-opened pull requests, the highest share reported.

Other platform activity also increased. GitHub Actions ran 1,440 jobs per second, or 124 million a day, more than three times last year’s total. Developers merged more than 30 million Dependabot pull requests, about double the 2025 pace, and push protection scanned for exposed secrets 5.8 billion times, nearly four times as often as in 2025.

Sources: GitHub Blog.