Octoverse: Commits, pushes, reach new highs in 2026 as developers build with agents

GitHub’s 2026 Octoverse report describes a sharp rise in global software development activity, with developers pushing code 17.9 billion times, making 34.3 billion commits, and merging 1.3 billion pull requests over the preceding year. The platform now serves more than 225 million developers, led by the United States and India, while growth is accelerating across regions and making long-term forecasts increasingly uncertain. AI coding agents emerged as a major factor in workflows: over 40% of pull requests began with an agent by September, repositories configured for agents averaged eight times more commits than comparable new repositories, and developers increasingly used agents for autonomous tasks while emphasizing review, security, and smaller pull-request workflows. Activity expanded beyond traditional software sectors into fields including health care, agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, research, and public services, with industry repositories showing substantial growth since 2022. Developers also used a broader mix of AI models, balancing general-purpose, reasoning-focused, and faster models depending on task requirements, while TypeScript, Python, and JavaScript remained the most-used languages and TypeScript, Python, and Rust showed particularly strong growth and AI involvement.

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