AI agents now start 4 in 10 GitHub code changes

GitHub's Octoverse 2026 report, published October 28, says more than 40 percent of pull requests started with an agent's first draft by September, up from 17 percent in March — 110 million agent-started pull requests in September alone, about six times March's volume.

The first move is now directing an agent, GitHub says, with review as the way developers shape what comes back. Agent-started pull requests merged within two weeks 90 percent of the time, against 86 percent for pull requests with no detected agent involvement.

GitHub counts only the agents it can detect and calls its figure a floor, so the real share is likely higher — and these are GitHub's own numbers about its own platform, not an outside audit.