GitHub says 2026 code activity hit records as agents spread

GitHub said developers pushed code 17.9 billion times in the past 12 months and that commits, merged pull requests and other activity all reached new highs as agents moved deeper into day-to-day software work. The company’s Octoverse report, published Oct. 28, 2026, describes a year in which developer activity accelerated across public and private repositories, with AI tools increasingly shaping how work starts, is reviewed and is completed.

Evidence and context

According to GitHub’s report, pushes to GitHub totaled 17.9 billion over the Octoverse year, more than 2024 and 2025 combined. Commits across all repository types climbed to 34.3 billion, more than three times the level two years earlier, while merged pull requests rose to 1.3 billion, an average of 3.5 million a day. GitHub also said Actions ran 1,440 jobs every second, Dependabot PRs topped 30 million, and push protection performed 5.8 billion scans during the period.

The report ties part of that growth to agentic workflows. Among repositories created this year, GitHub said the average repo with an agent configuration file logged eight times as many commits as the average new repo without one. It also said that by September 2026 more than 40% of pull requests started with an agent’s first draft, up from 17% in March, and that 63% of paying GitHub Copilot developers used auto model selection at least once in September. GitHub’s methodology notes that these figures measure observed platform usage, not model quality or a broader software-industry baseline.

GitHub said the year also marked broader geographic and sector expansion. The company said it now serves more than 225 million developers, with the United States at 38.3 million and India at 32.0 million in September 2026. Brazil added 3.28 million developers this year, according to the report. For the first time, GitHub also classified public repositories by industry, saying sectors including mining, construction, health care and agriculture have each grown several times over since 2022, while construction showed the highest share of agent-opened pull requests among the sectors it measured.

Language and model choice also shifted. GitHub said TypeScript remained the most used language by monthly contributors in 2026, ahead of Python and JavaScript, and that among developer-selected Copilot requests, 38% went to general-purpose models, 37% to deep-reasoning and planning models and 25% to fast and lightweight models. The company said 61% of Copilot users who selected a model themselves used more than one model in September, while the number of distinct models used by paid users rose from 29 in May to 47 in September.

The report highlights a sharp rise in open-source participation as well. Public contributions reached 2.5 billion, more than double 2025’s total of 1.12 billion, and GitHub cited examples ranging from disaster-response tooling in Nepal to research software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and open-source work in health care, manufacturing and energy. GitHub said the broad trend points to more developers building in more places, but noted that forecasts for future growth have become less certain because the 2026 surge widened the range of plausible outcomes.

One limitation matters: the source material provided here includes GitHub’s Octoverse 2026 report text, but the broader verification context supplied alongside it says GitHub’s official Octoverse index still identified Octoverse 2025 as its latest annual report as of Oct. 28, 2026. On that basis, the 2026 figures should be treated as claims in the supplied report text rather than independently verified platform results. The verified Octoverse 2025 report remains the last confirmed annual edition in the supplied background material.