GitHub Octoverse 2026: Commits and Pushes Hit Record Highs as Agent-Started PRs Reach 40% of Total

• GitHub activity reached record levels in 2026, with 34.3 billion commits (a 3x increase over two years) and 17.9 billion pushes, exceeding the combined totals of 2024 and 2025.
• Agent adoption accelerated significantly, with over 40% of all pull requests starting as agent drafts in September 2026, up from 17% in March; agent-started PRs showed an 87% multi-file change rate compared to 79% for non-agent PRs.
• GitHub Copilot Fusion, the general availability release of Project HydraFusion, launched to provide model orchestration and automatic model selection, routing approximately 60,000 sessions in its preview phase.
• The developer base expanded to over 225 million, with the United States (38.3 million) and India (32 million) leading in developer counts; TypeScript, Python, and JavaScript remained the top three languages by contributors, with Rust showing the highest year-over-year growth rate at 2x.

Model Selection and Orchestration

• 61% of Copilot users manually selecting models used at least one model per session in September 2026, up from 50% four months prior.
• The number of models available to paid Copilot users grew from 29 in May to 47 in September, with no single model holding more than 25% market share.
• Developer-selected request distribution favored general purpose models (38%) and deep reasoning/planning models (37%), while 63% of paid developers used auto model selection at least once.

Industry and Language Trends

• Construction had the highest agent PR ratio at approximately 9%, while administrative/support, mining, healthcare, and agriculture sectors showed over 40% AI mention rates but less than 3% agent PR ratios.
• TypeScript and Python are projected to reach approximately 13 million contributors each by September 2027, while JavaScript is projected to reach 7.4 million.
• AI involvement was detected in approximately 40-44% of merged PRs for TypeScript, Python, and Rust, compared to 21-34% for Java, C#, and C++.