GitHub Octoverse: construction repos lead agent pull requests, not AI-heavy sectors
About 9% of construction repositories got agent-opened pull requests, while sectors where four in ten repos mention AI stayed under 3%.
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TechKey facts
- Who
- GitHub, Octoverse 2026 report, October 28
- Odd result
- about 9% of construction repos had agent-opened PRs, the top sector, while AI-heavy sectors stayed under 3%
- Scale
- 17.9 billion pushes and 34.3 billion commits from October 2025 to September 2026
- Caveat
- now includes private repos, so earlier years were recalculated
GitHub's 2026 Octoverse report, published October 28, sorted public repositories by the industry they serve for the first time, and the sector most likely to see AI agents opening pull requests is construction. Roughly one in eleven construction repositories, about 9%, received a pull request opened by an agent, more than any other sector, while sectors where AI is mentioned far more often stayed below 3%.
Talking about AI is not the same as using agents
GitHub tracked two separate signals for each repository: whether its text mentions AI, and whether a coding agent opened a pull request against it. According to the report, the two often point in different directions.
Four sectors stand out for AI talk: agriculture, health care, mining, and administrative and support services. Over 40% of their repositories mention AI, but fewer than 3% have had an agent open a pull request. Construction is the reverse case. Roughly 25% of its repositories mention AI, yet it ranks first on agent activity, ahead of manufacturing.
The report does not explain the gap. It also notes that its agent signal is a floor, since GitHub can only count agents it can detect, and that industry labels were assigned by a language model reading each repository's name, description, topics and README. Sector shares are estimates from samples, not a full census.
The headline numbers, with an asterisk
The bigger figures will draw more attention. Developers pushed code 17.9 billion times in the 12 months to September 30, more than 2024 and 2025 combined, and made 34.3 billion commits. In September, agents wrote the first draft of more than 40% of pull requests, about 110 million of them. Six months earlier, in March, the share was 17%.
Those totals are not directly comparable with earlier editions. This year's report counts private as well as public repositories and uses an October to September window, so GitHub recalculated its 2024 and 2025 figures, which may differ from what it published before.
Agent pull requests also caught up on merge speed. The report measures how many land within 14 days: in February that was 83% for agent work against roughly 86% for everything else. By September agent work reached 90%, and the rest stayed near 86%.
Small details in the data
Repositories created in 2026 with an agent configuration file averaged eight times as many commits as new repositories without one, a correlation the report does not present as cause. Among repositories with an agent signal, TypeScript was the main language in 35%, against 24% without one.
And across every industry GitHub examined, the most-used emoji in repositories was the same one: the rocket. The report does not break down which construction projects are driving the agent activity.