AI agents now start more than 40% of pull requests on GitHub

GitHub's 2026 Octoverse report counts a record 17.9 billion pushes, more than 2024 and 2025 combined.

28 October 2026 1 min read tech.sydney newsroom

GitHub’s annual Octoverse report shows how quickly AI agents have become part of everyday software development.

Headline numbers

17.9 billion code pushes in 2026, more than 2024 and 2025 combined.
More than 40% of pull requests were started by AI agents.
8x more commits in repositories that use agent configuration files.
2.5 billion public contributions, double the previous year.

Languages and countries

TypeScript remains the most used language, followed by Python and JavaScript. The United States (38.3 million developers) and India (32 million) are the largest developer communities.

These are GitHub’s own figures, and GitHub can only count the agents it detects.

Sources

GitHub

This story summarises original reporting by the outlets above. Read their coverage for full detail.

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