Brazil has reached the milestone of 10.2 million developers on the GitHub platform, consolidating its position as the fourth country with the highest number of users on this Microsoft code-sharing service. This progress brings the country close to China, which has 12.4 million users, and GitHub projections indicate that Brazilians may surpass the Chinese by the year 2030.
This data was presented in the Octoverse 2026 report, released this Wednesday (28). In the last year, 3.28 million Brazilians joined the platform, a volume double that registered by new Chinese users. Only the United States and India recorded a higher number of new participants during the same period.
Furthermore, Brazil ranks fourth globally in terms of contributions to public repositories, where these contributions include so-called 'pushes,' which are code updates sent by developers to a specific project.
According to GitHub information, the maturation of the fintech sector in Brazil is cited as a factor that may accelerate the growth of the national developer community. This Brazilian advancement occurs in a context of major transformation in the programming field.
Globally, GitHub surpassed the mark of 225 million developers and recorded 17.9 billion pushes in the last twelve months, a volume greater than the sum of registrations from 2024 and 2025. Part of this growth is linked to the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, capable of performing software development tasks.
In September, over 40% of the code change requests (pull requests) that were approved and integrated into GitHub projects had an initial draft generated by an AI agent, totaling 110 million such requests in a single month. It is important to note that starting with an AI draft does not guarantee automatic approval or waive human review.
Despite this, these numbers demonstrate that automated tools are taking an increasingly larger role in the development cycle. The expansion of AI is also visible in the programming language ranking. TypeScript, Python, and JavaScript maintain their positions in the top three, but TypeScript showed the largest absolute increase on the platform, with 3.62 million new monthly contributors in one year. The Rust language also gained relevance, doubling its size during the period.
The report indicates that the choice of languages depends not only on programmers' preferences but also on the ease of working with AI-generated code and verifying the results. In TypeScript, Python, and Rust, AI agents participate in 40% to 44% of pull requests incorporated into projects. In Java, C#, and C++, this participation ranges between 21% and 34%. Additionally, TypeScript is present in 35% of repositories created in 2026 with AI assistance, compared to 24% of those that do not use this technology.
These data suggest that languages with characteristics favorable for checking machine-generated code are gaining ground in this new landscape. During GitHub Universe 2026, the company also announced new features for Copilot, its suite of AI tools focused on software development.
Among the announcements, the Fusion proposal reflects behavior already seen among users: 61% of Copilot customers switch between more than one AI model during the same session, aiming to combine more robust models for reasoning with lighter options for quick tasks. Another change concerns the billing of AI features for GitHub Enterprise customers; they will have access to new functionalities without needing a separate subscription, paying according to the consumed AI credits, making the cost more tied to agent usage.
To support the platform's growth and the use of AI tools, GitHub implemented four million processing cores, 160 petabytes of high-speed storage, and 50 terabits per second of network capacity in 2026. The company is also in the process of migrating to a distributed architecture across various regions of Microsoft's Azure cloud, scheduled for completion in early 2027. This infrastructure is crucial to meet the expansion of developers and the new demands imposed by AI agents.
Acquired by Microsoft in 2018, GitHub holds a central position in the evolution of AI tools applied to software development. In 2021, the platform introduced Copilot, developed by Microsoft and OpenAI, bringing generative AI features directly into the programming environment before the general public popularized ChatGPT in November 2022. Currently, the advance of agents points to a new phase, where systems not only suggest code snippets but also participate in broader development activities.
For Brazil, the growth of the community represents an opportunity to increase its presence on one of the main global programming platforms. Simultaneously, the increased participation of AI raises questions about the future of the activity: what proportion of the code will be produced directly by developers and what will be left to machines?
