Agents are the clearest driver in the report. As of September, developers started more than 40% of pull requests with an agent, up from 17% in March. Among repositories created this year, those with an agent configuration file logged eight times as many commits as the average new repo without one. GitHub's telemetry shows activity climbing steadily from January, then surging around June as better models, the tooling around them, and agents that could work across days and in the cloud all landed at once.

Model choice is fragmenting in step: in September, 61% of Copilot users worked with more than one model, spreading requests across general purpose, deep reasoning and fast lightweight options. Automation is scaling too, with GitHub Actions running a job 1,440 times every second, over three times last year's total, and more than 30 million Dependabot pull requests merged, roughly double 2025's pace.

The growth is broad as well as fast. Public contributions more than doubled to 2.5 billion, GitHub now serves more than 225 million developers, and for the first time the report breaks down public repositories by industry, with repos serving mining, construction, health care and agriculture each growing several times over since 2022. The report also credits individual builders, including a Nepali developer whose GitHub Pages flood bulletin grew into Gati, a Nepali-first relay of official disaster alerts.