GitHub Octoverse 2026

GitHub's Octoverse 2026 report shows merged pull requests tripled in less than a year to 220 million per month, commits more than tripled to 7.38 billion per month, and the new repository rate doubled to 30.3 million per month, with most of the commit increase landing in the second half of the year. GitHub attributed the surge to agentic engineering and detailed its methodology, including using LLM classification to extract ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes from contributor profiles and a fine-tuned multilingual embedding model to sort public repositories created from 2022 to 2026 into NAICS industry sectors. The report also breaks out repositories whose name, description, topics or README mention interoperability or reverse engineering, including terms such as clean room implementation, drop-in replacement and protocol re-implementation.

This is a pretty stark representation of the impact of agentic engineering on GitHub. In 2026, merged pull requests tripled in less than a year to 220 million per month. Commits more than tripled to 7.38 billion per month, with most of that increase in the second half of this year. New repository rate doubled this year, to 30.3 million per month. The report includes new numbers by industry, and breaks out numbers for repositories that involve "interoperability or reverse engineering". The methodology section https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-commits-pushes-reach-new-highs-in-2026-as-developers-build-with-agents/ h-methodology includes notes about how they did this: Top countries by pushes to public repositories, adjusted by profile location . Pushes from each country were summed across the Octoverse year. To adjust for biases caused by VPN usage, LLM classification was used to extract the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code from the profiles of GitHub users who contributed pushes during this period ... Industry . Public repositories created 2022 to 2026 were sorted into NAICS sectors by a fine-tuned multilingual embedding model using name, description, topics, and README, from random samples per year. ... Interoperability . Counts public repositories created each year whose name, description, topics, or README mention interoperability or reverse engineering, or related terms, such as clean room implementation, drop-in replacement, or protocol re-implementation. Tags: github https://simonwillison.net/tags/github , ai https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai , generative-ai https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai , llms https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms , coding-agents https://simonwillison.net/tags/coding-agents , disclosures https://simonwillison.net/tags/disclosures , agentic-engineering https://simonwillison.net/tags/agentic-engineering