AI agents just blew up GitHub: commits tripled in under a year

GitHub has published its annual Octoverse report, and the numbers look like an army moved onto the platform. One did, except it is made of AI agents. The report was presented on October 28 at GitHub Universe and covers October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026.

Merged pull requests (finished changes accepted into a project) tripled in less than a year to 220 million a month. Commits more than tripled to 7.38 billion a month, with most of the jump in the second half of the year. New repositories now appear twice as fast, 30.3 million a month. Over the whole year developers pushed code to GitHub 17.9 billion times, more than in 2024 and 2025 combined.

The headline number is about agents. In September developers started more than 40% of pull requests with an agent, up from 17% in March. So the first draft of a change is more and more often written by AI, while a person reviews it and shapes the result. Another detail: new repositories with an agent configuration file logged eight times as many commits on average as new repositories without one.

Developer Simon Willison, who was at the keynote, called the charts a stark picture of what agentic engineering has done to GitHub. The platform now counts more than 225 million developers, with the largest communities in the US (38.3 million) and India (32 million).

The fine print is simple: these are activity counters, not a quality score. More commits do not mean more good code. But the direction is clear: the first one to sit down and write code is less and less often a human.