Jay Parikh, EVP of GitHub, announced the Octoverse 2026 report during a keynote at GitHub Universe, presenting data that shows a sharp rise in automated development activity. Merged pull requests reached 220 million per month, a threefold increase from the previous year. Monthly commits climbed to 7.38 billion, with the majority of that growth occurring in the second half of 2026. The creation of new repositories also accelerated, doubling to 30.3 million per month.
The report attributes this surge to the widespread adoption of agentic engineering, where software agents handle coding tasks. GitHub used LLM classification to adjust user location data for VPN usage and fine-tuned embedding models to categorise repositories by industry. The dataset specifically tracked public repositories mentioning interoperability or reverse engineering, such as clean room implementations or protocol re-implementations. These metrics reflect internal platform usage rather than changes to customer account policies or API behaviour.
* Pull request volume tripled in under a year
* Most commit growth happened in the second half of 2026
* Repository categorisation relied on fine-tuned multilingual models
