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

GitHub’s 2026 Octoverse report highlights a record year of developer activity, with 17.9 billion code pushes to the platform in the past 12 months—exceeding the combined total of 2024 and 2025. The surge reflects developers addressing community needs, such as a Nepali developer who built a flood bulletin on GitHub Pages that evolved into Gati, a disaster alert relay now used by officials. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory contributed software for spacecraft programs, while open-source firmware enabled customization of e-readers, illustrating diverse applications of the platform.

Activity on GitHub accelerated sharply mid-year, coinciding with the rise of AI agents transitioning from experimental tools to persistent collaborators. Developers explored more models than ever, expanding into industries like healthcare and agriculture, which are featured in the report for the first time. The report emphasizes the rapid evolution of AI tools and their integration into daily workflows, with agents executing tasks remotely and tracking progress over extended periods.

Commits to GitHub reached 34.3 billion, more than triple the figure from two years ago, while merged pull requests tripled to 1.3 billion, averaging 3.5 million daily. Repositories configured with agent files logged eight times more commits than those without, indicating faster development cycles for teams leveraging AI. GitHub Actions ran 1,440 jobs per second, totaling 124 million daily, and Dependabot merged over 30 million pull requests to update dependencies and mitigate vulnerabilities.

The surge in activity extended globally, with the U.S. and India remaining the largest developer communities, adding over 10 million each. Brazil added 3.28 million developers, the third-highest growth. Public contributions soared to 2.5 billion, more than double last year’s total, with notable maintainers like @kinlane and @kim-em contributing over a million and 178,000 times respectively. Forecasting models now project extreme growth scenarios, with developer counts potentially tripling by 2031.