GitHub developers made 17.9 billion code pushes over the past 12 months, surpassing the combined total for 2024 and 2025, according to the company’s Octoverse figures. Agent use also increased: developers initiated more than 40% of pull requests through an agent in September, compared with 17% in March. Across private and public repositories, commits reached 34.3 billion, exceeding three times the level recorded two years earlier.
For repositories started this year, those containing an agent configuration file averaged eight times the commits of those without one, GitHub said. That measures code activity against GitHub’s own stated priority at this week’s Universe event: completed software work as the meaningful output. Model switching was also common, with 61% of GitHub Copilot users choosing multiple models during September.
Read more: GitHub Copilot Gains Computer Use for Desktop Apps
GitHub said its activity data showed gradual growth from January before a sharp acceleration around June. Beginning in June, newly created repositories accounted for about 55% of commits. Merged pull requests reached 1.3 billion, more than tripling over two years and averaging 3.5 million daily.
Automation grew alongside that activity, with GitHub Actions executing 124 million jobs daily, equivalent to 1,440 each second and more than triple the previous year’s total. Developers merged over 30 million pull requests from Dependabot, roughly twice the 2025 pace. Public contributions reached 2.5 billion, compared with 1.12 billion a year earlier.
GitHub’s developer population now exceeds 225 million, with the United States accounting for 38.3 million and India for 32 million. Both countries gained more than 10 million developers this year, while Brazil added 3.28 million, the third-largest increase. Developers who pushed code during the past year had used GitHub for an average of 36 months, and the average developer worked across 10% more repositories than a year earlier.
Separately, Microsoft steered its own engineers toward GitHub Copilot CLI earlier this year, when its Experiences + Devices division was directed to leave Claude Code by June 30. At the time, Claude models were expected to stay available through Copilot CLI even as engineers shifted their workflows onto it.
