Building software looks completely different than it did a year ago, and the implications are becoming clear.
In GitHub's 15th annual Octoverse report unveiled last week at the GitHub Universe event, the Microsoft-owned developer platform revealed that 40% of all GitHub pull requests, a major part of the technical process for updating software, started with an agent in September, up from 17% just six months ago.
And the use of AI coding agents is dramatically increasing overall software development activity. GitHub recorded 17.9 billion code pushes during its annual reporting period ending in September 2026. That's more than it reported in its 2024 and 2025 reports combined. And the activity hit another gear in June of this year, as the chart below shows.
That momentum means the human role in software development is evolving toward deciding what to build, choosing the right models and tools to build with, and judging the results. That is going to change the skills developers need. It will put more weight on analysis, critical thinking, ideation, and evaluation. As AI accelerates the speed of development, it becomes more important than ever to be able to judge which work deserves to move forward.
Tala Karadsheh, GitHub's senior director of business insights, told The Deep View that the report showed we're moving to a world where agents will write the first draft of the code while professionals developers will develop a process to review the outputs and manage quality and risk.
Other interesting takeaways from the report include:
- Use of Copilot’s cloud agent grew 230% year over year, compared with 85% for agent chat, which is more evidence of developers shifting from using AI to answer questions to delegating entire tasks to it.
- Paid Copilot users drew on 47 distinct models in September, and none carried more than 25% of requests, which show no one model or lab is winning and model use is diversifying.
- Over 60% of paying Copilot users tried automatic model selection at least once in September, which shows the huge opportunity for model routing and making AI more efficient.
- Both AI-assisted code review and GitHub Advanced Security grew more than 90% year over year, indicating that demand is also growing for using AI to double-check and secure software.
- Public repositories serving construction work grew about 17x since 2022, while mining-related repositories grew about 65x (off a small base), which shows that use of AI is broadening across more specialized industries.
Our Deeper View #
Software development has been on the front lines of the generative AI boom. It's been the biggest beneficiary of LLM capabilities and it's also been the profession most deeply impacted by the new technology. GitHub, as the place where over 200 million developers host and collaborate on code, has been at the epicenter of the revolution. One of my biggest surprises over the past year has been people outside of tech revealing that they now have GitHub accounts and have been vibe coding solutions to some of their thorniest problems. But the rise of coding agents and the ability of AI to let a lot more people code has not led to the downfall of the software developer. In fact, many are even more in demand because there's a lot more code in the world to manage. But as this year's GitHub Octoverse report made clear, AI is changing the human skills and capabilities that are most in-demand. And software engineering may just be the beginning, with similar phenomena to come for other professions soon.