GitHub Octoverse 2026: agent-started PRs now merge more often than the rest
More than 40% of September's pull requests on GitHub began with an agent's draft, up from 17% in March, and by September 90% of them merged within two weeks against about 86% for everything else. The report counts merges, not what happened after.
Source: Octoverse: Commits, pushes, reach new highs in 2026 as developers build with agents
GitHub's 2026 Octoverse report puts platform-wide numbers on the shift from writing code to directing agents. By September 2026, more than 40% of pull requests on GitHub started with a draft from a coding agent GitHub could detect, up from 17% in March. That was about 110 million agent-started pull requests in September alone, roughly six times March's volume. Merged pull requests across the year more than tripled to 1.3 billion.
The merge-rate figure is the one to watch. In February, 83% of agent-involved pull requests merged within two weeks, slightly behind the roughly 86% for pull requests with no detected agent. By September, agent pull requests were at 90% while the comparison group held at about 86%. Agent-started pull requests also touched more files: about 87% changed several files, against 79% for the rest.
GitHub ties the jump around June to agents becoming persistent: tools that track progress across days, coordinate other agents, and run in the cloud rather than only on a developer's laptop. Among Copilot users, the fully delegated cloud agent, where a developer assigns a task and the agent works alone, grew 230% year over year, against 85% for agent chat. Review tooling is growing alongside it. Stacked pull requests reached more than 264,000 developers within two months of launch, and AI-assisted code review usage grew more than 90%.
Why it matters for code review
This is the first platform-scale sign that agents working without a developer at the keyboard can land work at a higher rate than people do, not just produce more of it. Read the caveats before leaning on it. GitHub counts only agents it can detect, so the agent share is a floor. And "merged within two weeks" says a reviewer accepted the change, not that it held up afterwards: the report has no revert or incident data. A rising merge rate under a sixfold rise in volume can mean the checks got better, or that reviewers got more lenient. The report alone can't tell you which.