# Agents now start four in ten pull requests on GitHub

URL: https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/blog/agents-now-start-four-in-ten-pull-requests-on-github
Published: 2026-10-29
Author: Roman Aglaganov, Full-stack developer
Category: Industry
Region: Global
Tags: coding, agents

> GitHub’s annual Octoverse report says more than 40% of pull requests in September began with an AI agent’s first draft, up from 17% in March. Developers pushed code 17.9 billion times in a year, more than in 2024 and 2025 combined.

![Illustration: many thin grey lines branching from a black trunk line and merging back into it, with a growing share of the branches drawn in black and one in red](https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/api/media/file/octoverse-1.png)

GitHub published its yearly Octoverse report on 28 October, covering activity from October 2025 to September 2026. The headline is how quickly AI agents have become part of ordinary software work.

## Agents write the first draft

A pull request is a proposed change to a codebase that others review before it is merged. GitHub says that by September 2026 more than 40% of pull requests on the platform started with an agent’s first draft, up from 17% in March. That was 110 million agent-started pull requests in September alone, about six times March’s volume. The figures count only agents GitHub can detect.

Those pull requests are getting accepted. In February, 83% of agent-involved pull requests were merged within two weeks, slightly behind the roughly 86% for others. By September, 90% of agent pull requests were merged in that time, while the others stayed at about 86%.

Among monthly users of GitHub Copilot, 55% now use its agent features, up from 35% a year ago. The fastest-growing mode is the most hands-off one: Copilot’s cloud agent, where a developer assigns a task and the agent works on it alone, grew 230% in a year.

## More of everything

Developers pushed code to GitHub 17.9 billion times over the year, more than in 2024 and 2025 combined, and made 34.3 billion commits. GitHub says activity bent sharply upward around June, when agents moved from single sessions to persistent tools that could work across days. Among repositories created this year, the average one with an agent configuration file had eight times as many commits as one without.

GitHub now has more than 225 million developers. The US (38.3 million) and India (32 million) are the largest communities. TypeScript remained the most used language, ahead of Python and JavaScript.

## Many models, and the review problem

In September 61% of Copilot users who chose a model themselves used more than one, and no single model handled more than 25% of requests. GitHub also made Copilot Fusion generally available; it picks a model for each step of a task. The report says review is now where developers shape what agents produce, and use of AI-assisted code review and GitHub Advanced Security both grew more than 90%. The security firm GitGuardian argues that checks for leaked passwords and keys need to keep pace, citing its own finding that commits made with Claude Code exposed secrets at about twice the usual rate.

## Sources

- [The GitHub Blog: Octoverse: commits, pushes reach new highs in 2026 as developers build with agents](https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-commits-pushes-reach-new-highs-in-2026-as-developers-build-with-agents/)
- [GitGuardian: GitHub Octoverse 2026, five takeaways for security teams](https://blog.gitguardian.com/github-octoverse-2026/)