The 2026 Octoverse report highlights a paradigm shift where AI agents have moved from experimental tools to core collaborators. This surge in automation and multi-model usage is drastically increasing developer velocity and expanding software engineering into non-traditional industries.
Developers pushed code to GitHub 17.9 billion times in the past 12 months, more than in 2024 and 2025 combined.
Behind that number are developers building what interests them and what their communities need. In Nepal, one developer built a flood bulletin on GitHub Pages with verified information on roads, rescue, weather, and power. It has since grown into Gati, a Nepali-first relay of official disaster alerts that runs on GitHub Pages and Actions. Elsewhere, developers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are creating software designed to run programs aboard spacecraft, and fans built open-source firmware that lets people customize their e-readers. Curiosity, aimed in every direction, at a scale GitHub hasn’t seen before.
That growth happened quickly. Partway through the year, activity on GitHub bent sharply upward, just as agents went from something developers were trying out to something they were working alongside. Developers picked from more models than ever and built in industries we are highlighting in this report for the first time, from health care to agriculture.
Octoverse is our chance to step back and look at the whole picture. This year, that picture is bigger than ever. Here is what stood out most:
Underneath it all, AI models and the harnesses built around them have advanced over the past year, and developers have more to choose from. Growth is moving quickly: one year into last year’s five-year developer growth projections, every country we projected has already closed at least a fifth of its distance to 2030, and our own forecasting models no longer agree on where it will go next.
This year was all about momentum. Developers pushed code changes to GitHub 17.9 billion times in the past 12 months, more than 2024 and 2025 combined. Commits across all repo types (public and private) climbed even faster to 34.3 billion, more than three times where they stood two years ago. Merged pull requests more than tripled to 1.3 billion over the same period, an average of 3.5 million a day.
Agents were one of the tools developers leaned on hardest this year, pulling them deeper into daily work. Among repos created this year, the average repo with an agent configuration file logged eight times as many commits as the average new repo without one, sign that individuals and teams building with agents from day one are moving at a markedly different pace.
Developers also relied on automations to keep projects moving. GitHub Actions ran a job 1,440 times every second this year. This equals 124 million times a day and is more than three times last year’s total. Developers merged more than 30 million Dependabot pull requests to keep dependencies current and reduce the use of known vulnerabilities, about double 2025’s pace.
Our telemetry shows activity climbing steadily from January, then surging around June, as if developers everywhere saw new possibilities at once. Right around then, a cluster of industry-wide shifts landed: better underlying models, the harnesses and tools built around them, and the agents running on both. Agents moved from single-session tools to persistent ones that could track progress across days and orchestrate other specialized agents. Just as important, agents began making extensive use of the cloud, executing work remotely as well as on local machines.
This momentum is showing up both in brand-new repos and from developers who have been building for years. From June onwards, about 55% of all commits came from brand new repositories. But plenty more commits came from developers who’ve been around a while: developers who pushed code in the past 12 months have been on GitHub for an average of 36 months, and of those who opened a pull request in August, more than 75% pushed code in September. They are also branching out: the average developer now works across 10% more repositories than they did a year ago.
That staying power shows up in open source too. Public contributions soared to 2.5 billion in 2026, more than double last year’s total (1.12 billion). Behind those numbers are developers who keep showing up, like @kinlane, who made more than 1 million contributions across his public repositories using agentic workflows to keep a machine-readable catalog of public API information current. Another example is @kim-em, who made more than 178,000 contributions while maintaining mathlib, which is a community library of computer-checked mathematics. @andig, a maintainer of the open source EV charging controller and home energy management system evcc, contributed over 21,000 times.
These are just a few examples of the work millions of developers do every day. To all the developers doing work like this and beyond: we see you, and we’re glad you’re building.
Behind every number in this report is a developer. GitHub now serves more than 225 million of them, and the community is growing around the globe. The United States (38.3 million) and India (32 million) remain the two largest developer communities, and each added more than 10 million developers this year. Brazil added 3.28 million developers on GitHub this year, the third most of any country.
| Country | Total number of developers on GitHub in Sept. 2026 |
|---|---|
| United States | 38.3 M |
| India | 32.0 M |
| China | 12.4 M |
| Brazil | 10.2 M |
| Japan | 7.15 M |
| United Kingdom | 6.47 M |
| Indonesia | 6.34 M |
| Germany | 6.30 M |
| Russia | 5.07 M |
| France | 4.75 M |
Last year, we projected that India would reach 57.5 million developers by 2030 and the United States 54.7 million. One year into that five-year window, every country in our projections has already closed at least a fifth of the distance to its own 2030 figure. The United States has closed 38.6%, and India 28.3%.
The same momentum shows up across regions, each with its own local context:
| Region | Growth driver | Market context |
|---|---|---|
| Americas | Fintech and digital payments | • Brazil: mature, fast-growing fintech sector • Canada: steady AI and software investment |
| EMEA | AI adoption in manufacturing and startups. Fast-growing developer community in Africa | • Morocco: fintech and startup scene • Germany: enterprise AI adoption across its industrial heartland • France and Spain: AI and deep-tech startups • Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa: fintech, agritech, and coding bootcamps |
| APAC | Government investment in AI infrastructure and talent | • Indonesia: booming digital economy • Japan: AI infrastructure investment • South Korea: government-backed AI talent programs • Australia: AI, machine learning, and data skills |
One year in, growth is strong against last year’s projection, and projecting the next five years is getting harder. We ran more than 40 forecasting models forward to 2031, time-series and regression models built on historical sign-up and usage data, each assuming a different pace of growth. About half call for “extreme” growth, with developer counts on GitHub more than tripling by 2031. Just under half call for “substantial” growth, doubling to tripling. Only three models expect anything close to modest, under 2x growth.
Forecasts are estimates, and a spread this wide shows how much the 2026 surge widened what is plausible by 2031. What holds steady is the shape of the trend: a developer community growing in more places at once.
In past reports, “everywhere” meant more developers and more countries, such as in the context of the top countries contributing code to public repositories:
| Rank | Country |
|---|---|
| 1 | United States |
| 2 | India |
| 3 | China |
| 4 | Brazil |
| 5 | Germany |
| 6 | United Kingdom |
| 7 | Korea |
| 8 | France |
| 9 | Japan |
| 10 | Canada |
This year, it also means more fields, including industries we haven’t measured before.
We’re sharing our view of public repositories by industry using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which sorts economic activity into sectors. A language model classified random samples of public repositories created each year from 2022 to 2026, assigning each to the industry it serves based on its name, description, topics, and README. We also tracked two signals: whether a repository mentions AI, and whether an agent opened a pull request against it.
The two signals do not always move together. In administrative and support services, mining, health care, and agriculture, more than four in 10 repositories mention AI, yet agent-opened pull requests are rare, less than 3 percent. Construction breaks that pattern. About a quarter of its repositories mention AI, but about 9 percent have agent-opened pull requests, the highest share of any sector, with manufacturing next.
The same classification shows how each industry’s footprint has shifted since 2022, and sectors well beyond software are climbing. Professional, scientific, and technical services rose from fourth to second place among all industries, behind only information. Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting climbed two spots, and finance and insurance and health care and social assistance each moved up one. Against each sector’s own 2022 baseline, mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction grew roughly 65 times from a small starting base, administrative and support services and construction 17 to 18 times, and even manufacturing, the slowest of these, almost tripled.
Behind these sector shifts are people who know their fields, now using AI coding agents to build. For example, in manufacturing, a small team built a way to turn a photo of your tools into a custom-fit, 3D-printable drawer organizer. A research lab in health care made it easier for scientists to analyze huge digital scans of tissue samples, the kind pathologists study to understand disease. In Copenhagen, a university lab built a pipeline that classifies video of chickens at play, from frolicking to worm chasing. A University of Waikato energy center built a toolkit that helps industrial plants find heat they can reuse, and Bulgaria’s digital ministry open-sourced a portal where anyone can trace who won a public contract and for how much. For writers, a novelist built a free app that makes a manuscript look like a book as you type. In field after field, the people closest to the problem are building the solution, with agents helping along the way.
Professional, scientific, and technical services, which grew about 5 times over its own 2022 baseline and climbed to second place, is the work of researching, engineering, and advising, and open code has long been part of how that work gets done. In biochemistry, the work behind AlphaFold earned Demis Hassabis and John Jumper a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In computer science, Tensor2Tensor accompanied the paper that introduced the Transformer, the architecture behind today’s large language models, “Attention Is All You Need.” In medicine, sars-cov-2-stability held the code and data behind one of the earliest papers on how long the virus survives in the air and on surfaces. In physics, eht-imaging was one of two open-source libraries used to reconstruct the first image of a black hole. A repository has quietly become part of the paper trail behind published research.
More developers now begin a pull request by specifying what they want and orchestrating the agents that carry it out. By September 2026, more than 40% of pull requests on GitHub started with an agent’s first draft, up from 17% in March. That is 110 million in September alone, about 6x March’s volume.
Agent-started pull requests also more often change multiple files: about 87%, compared with 79% of pull requests without detected agent involvement. They are landing quickly too. In February, 83% of agent-involved pull requests merged within two weeks, a touch behind the roughly 86% for pull requests without detected agent involvement. By September, agent pull requests were at 90%, while the comparison group held at about 86%.
Among GitHub Copilot’s monthly active users, 55% now use agentic features, up from 35% a year ago. The steepest growth is in the most hands-off mode. Copilot cloud agent, where a developer assigns a task and an agent works on it independently, grew 230% year over year, against 85% for agent chat. Developers still ask agents questions, and increasingly they hand over whole tasks.
The willingness to delegate is reflected by the kinds of tasks developers are attempting. Public repositories mentioning interoperability or reverse engineering increased more than 300% year over year, from about 30,000 created in 2025 to more than 130,000 in 2026.
Review is where developers shape what comes back, and more tooling is being built for it. Stacked pull requests, which split related work into smaller changes that are easier to review in sequence, launched as a preview on July 30, and more than 264,000 developers had used them by September. Usage of AI-assisted code review and GitHub Advanced Security both grew more than 90% year over year. The platform also helps secure that work: push protection, which screens for exposed secrets such as API keys and passwords, ran 5.8 billion scans this year, nearly four times 2025’s pace. Developers are investing in how they review code.
Developers match models to the work they hand to their agents. In September 2026, 61% of GitHub Copilot users who selected a model themselves used more than one model across their sessions, up from 50% four months earlier.
The lineup is growing too: developers on paid GitHub Copilot plans used 29 distinct models in May and 47 in September, and no single model carried more than 25% of requests that month. Some model decisions come down to cost and familiarity. Developers weigh price and functionality against need and may lean toward providers they already trust.
To see how developer choices spread, we grouped the models used in GitHub Copilot by what they are built for: deep reasoning and planning, general purpose, and fast and lightweight. We then looked at where requests went, counting only activity where a developer explicitly selected a model. That leaves out cases where GitHub Copilot picks the model (auto model selection), GitHub and Microsoft staff usage, background utility models, duplicate requests used for monitoring and testing, and requests made with a developer’s own API key.
We found that out of every 100 developer-selected requests, 38 went to general purpose models, 37 to deep reasoning and planning models, and 25 to fast and lightweight models. Developers spread their choices across models and functionality, and about 25% of requests go to a fast model.
To see how those choices shift, we looked at them as a time series over the past three months, tracking request share alongside how many developers tried each model and how many kept coming back. Three patterns stand out:
Taken together, the spread across kinds of models points to a lot of choosing: a lineup that keeps growing, a best fit that shifts from one task to the next, and all three kinds of models held in rotation. Many developers also let GitHub Copilot do some of it. In September 2026, 63% of paying GitHub Copilot developers used auto model selection at least once, letting Copilot pick the model for the task.
Planning, implementing, and checking a change each place different demands on a model, in capability, speed, and cost. Project HydraFusion, began as a research preview of model orchestration, matching models to each step of that work. In the CLI and the GitHub Copilot app, it routed almost 60,000 sessions. That work is now generally available as GitHub Copilot Fusion, which brings model orchestration together with auto model selection and chooses the right model for each step behind the scenes.
Language choice has long reflected what developers want to build, what their teams know, and what existing systems require. This year’s data raises the question of whether a fourth influence is emerging: the language an agent picks when a developer doesn’t specify one.
Last year, we reported that TypeScript had overtaken Python and JavaScript to become the most used language on GitHub by contributors. That order held in 2026, with TypeScript first, Python second, and JavaScript third. The pace picked up. From September 2025 to September 2026, TypeScript added 3.62 million monthly contributors, Python 3.23 million, and JavaScript 1.82 million, the largest gains among the top 10 languages. Rust grew fastest by percentage among the top languages, doubling in the past year.
Our forecasts extend recent trends: TypeScript and Python near 13 million monthly contributors each by September 2027, JavaScript at 7.4 million, and every other language in the top 10 below about 2.2 million.
The languages growing fastest are also where AI shows up most. We charted each language’s community growth over the past year against the share of its merged pull requests with detected AI involvement, with bubbles roughly sized to show the size of each language’s community. TypeScript, Python, and Rust, the fastest-growing communities, have the highest shares, about 40% to 44% of merged pull requests. Java, C#, and C++ sit lower, between about 21% and 34%, though AI shows up in more than one in five merged pull requests in every language shown.
The repository data adds another angle. Among repositories created in 2026, TypeScript was the primary language in 35% of those with an observed agent signal, compared to 24% without one. For repositories created before 2026, the gap was similar: 27% with an agent signal, versus 17% without. That suggests developers who work with agents gravitate toward languages where agent output is easier to check. Developers who know exactly what they want still specify the language. But when they leave the choice open, agents appear to favor a narrower set of languages, TypeScript chief among them.
This year, we split the fastest-growing and most-engaged projects on GitHub into two groups: community and independent repositories, and single-vendor or product-led ones. Community and independent projects are foundation-governed, broadly maintained, or led by an individual without a clear commercial sponsor. Single-vendor and product-led projects are open source or source-available and often take substantial community contributions, but strategic control sits with one company.
Read together, the two lists show a division of labor. The community side is mostly the foundation underneath everything else: inference engines like vLLM, SGLang, and llama.cpp, frameworks like PyTorch, languages and runtimes like Rust and CPython, and platforms like Home Assistant and Godot. The vendor side is mostly the tools developers work with directly: coding agents, editors, and the orchestration around them. Contributors are showing up for both layers. The growth list also includes places built to welcome newcomers, like first-contributions and is-a-dev/register, where many developers make their first pull request.
| Rank | Community / independent | Single vendor / product-led |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | farion1231/cc-switch | Anthropic: anthropics/claude-code |
| 2 | punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers | OpenAI: openai/codex |
| 3 | Omacom Foundation: omacom/omarchy | Anomaly: anomalyco/opencode |
| 4 | firstcontributions/first-contributions | Microsoft: microsoft/vscode |
| 5 | ggml-org/llama.cpp | GitHub: github/copilot-cli |
| 6 | Eclipse Foundation: EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org | Zed Industries: zed-industries/zed |
| 7 | sgl-project/sglang | Google: google-gemini/gemini-cli |
| 8 | vllm-project/vllm | BerriAI: BerriAI/litellm |
| 9 | imputnet/helium | microsoft/winget-pkgs |
| 10 | vllm-project/vllm-ascend | Kilo-Org/kilocode |
| Rank | Community / independent | Single vendor / product-led |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | OpenClaw Foundation: openclaw/openclaw | Nous Research: NousResearch/hermes-agent |
| 2 | vllm-project/vllm | Anomaly: anomalyco/opencode |
| 3 | ggml-org/llama.cpp | Earendil: earendil-works/pi |
| 4 | Omacom Foundation: omacom/omarchy | Stably AI: stablyai/orca |
| 5 | farion1231/cc-switch | Ping: pingdotgg/t3code |
| 6 | sgl-project/sglang | Microsoft: microsoft/vscode |
| 7 | PyTorch Foundation: pytorch/pytorch | Graphify Labs: Graphify-Labs/graphify |
| 8 | Rust Foundation: rust-lang/rust | Paperclip AI: paperclipai/paperclip |
| 9 | Open Home Foundation: home-assistant/core | BerriAI: BerriAI/litellm |
| 10 | Python Software Foundation: python/cpython | can1357/oh-my-pi |
As part of our research this year, we also tracked the emoji developers used most in their repositories. Across every industry we looked at, the rocket 🚀 topped the list, by a wide margin. A fitting symbol for a year of momentum. Developers on GitHub covered more ground this year: more code, more countries, and more industries than we’ve ever measured. None of that activity changes who decides what the code should do. Someone still has to come up with the idea, whether it’s software that assesses earthquake risk, an open record of how online services change their terms and privacy policies, or an agent skill that makes an AI answer like a caveman to save on words. And someone still has to decide whether it works, whether it belongs, and whether it’s good.
What did change is how much easier it is to take an idea from a weekend thought to something real.
The tools will keep changing, and new industries will keep showing up in places we didn’t expect. What a developer chooses to build, and who they build it for, is still theirs to decide. Rocket emoji and all.
The post Octoverse: Commits, pushes, reach new highs in 2026 as developers build with agents appeared first on The GitHub Blog.
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