GitHub Octoverse 2026: Merged PRs Rise to 220 Million per Month
In the Octoverse 2026 report, GitHub announced that in 2026 merged pull requests rose to 220 million per month in less than a year, commits rose to 7.38 billion per month, and the rate of new repository creation doubled to 30.3 million per month. The report also tallies repository data by industry, and separately counts public repositories whose names, descriptions, topics, or READMEs involve interoperability or reverse engineering. The methodology section explains that for country rankings, an LLM extracts ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes from user profiles to correct for VPN bias, while for industry classification, a fine-tuned multilingual embedding model is used to categorize public repositories created between 2022 and 2026 according to NAICS.
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The merged PR, commit, and new repository data in Octoverse 2026 collectively reflect the impact of agentic engineering on the scale of collaboration on GitHub.
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28th October 2026 - Link Blog
GitHub Octoverse 2026. I'm at GitHub Universe today (GitHub gave me a free ticket through their "GitHub Stars" program). EVP Jay Parikh just announced this year's Octoverse report, and highlighted these numbers in particular:
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 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.
Posted 28th October 2026 at 4:45 pm
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This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 28th October 2026.