If you want one number that shows how fast software development is changing, GitHub just supplied it.
In its 2026 Octoverse report, GitHub says that by September more than 40% of pull requests on the platform started with an agent’s first draft, up from 17% in March. That’s 110 million agent-started pull requests in September alone, about six times March’s volume.
Record activity everywhere
Developers pushed code to GitHub 17.9 billion times in the past 12 months, more than in 2024 and 2025 combined. Commits reached 34.3 billion, and merged pull requests more than tripled to 1.3 billion. GitHub Actions ran 124 million jobs a day.
GitHub says activity surged around June, when better models, better tooling and more persistent, cloud-running agents arrived at about the same time. Among new repositories, those with an agent configuration file logged eight times as many commits as those without one.
Agent pull requests are also getting merged. By September, 90% of agent-involved pull requests merged within two weeks, compared with about 86% for the rest. Among Copilot’s monthly active users, 55% now use agentic features, up from 35% a year ago.
GitHub now serves more than 225 million developers. The US remains the largest community with 38.3 million developers.
Copilot Fusion goes GA
Developers are also mixing models. In September, 61% of Copilot users who chose their own model used more than one. GitHub’s answer is Copilot Fusion, now generally available, which routes and orchestrates models for each task instead of making developers pick.
Fusion comes in Standard, High and Max effort levels. GitHub says Fusion Max scored 60 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, within two points of Claude Code with Opus 5.5 Max, at about half the average API cost per task. Admins control which models Fusion can use, and paid Copilot users get a 30% discount on model costs for a limited time.
Why it matters
Software teams are shifting from writing code to directing and reviewing agents. That changes what engineering leaders buy: code review, security scanning, governance and AI cost controls all move up the priority list.
For dev tools, DevOps and AppSec vendors, the message to buyers should match this reality. Engineering leaders are looking for help managing agent-written code at scale, and that is a timely angle for outbound campaigns.
Sources: GitHub Octoverse, GitHub Changelog. Written by the xRapid Media LLP team.
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