GitHub Universe 2026: public notes and recap posts

Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President of CoreAI at Microsoft, wrote: “Today at GitHub Universe, we shared our vision for GitHub as the most comprehensive software delivery system in the world.” He framed that system around velocity, intelligence, and quality: “get from idea to completed software as quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible”; “combine context across the platform with a continuous learning engine”; and “make completed work secure by default and catch bugs before they ship.”

The same post announced:

• GitHub Copilot app. “The GitHub Copilot app is designed from the ground up for agentic software delivery. It connects your agents and tools across projects, so you can direct the work without making every handoff.”
• Copilot Fusion. “Copilot Fusion evaluates what a task needs across reasoning, code generation, debugging, and tool use, then chooses how to execute across one or more models.” GitHub reported that “In the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, Fusion Max scored within two points of Opus 5.5 Max at half the cost and 40% less time per task.”
• Copilot projects. “Copilot projects let you run agent work across multiple repos in fully managed, parallel sessions.”
• Session continuity. “Session continuity lets you start and follow the same cloud agent session across the GitHub app, VS Code, the CLI, and the web.”
• Copilot automations. “Copilot automations let you create AI-powered workflows within your repo.” They “can learn from their outcomes and propose improvements for you to review and approve.”
• Copilot code review Max. GitHub said the new Max level “posted the highest F1 score on ReviewBench for high-severity issues.”
• Copilot features without a separate enterprise subscription. “Starting today, GitHub Enterprise customers can use all Copilot features without buying a separate subscription… You pay for the AI credits you use.”

On infrastructure, the post said GitHub had added “4 million CPU cores,” “160 PB of high-speed storage,” and “50 Tb/s network capacity” so far that year, and was “migrating to a multi-region deployment in Azure,” expected to complete “early next year.” It also described a new Git architecture: “simplify the primitives, decouple storage from compute, and minimize coordination.”

Parikh also wrote: “I think all the software we’ve written to date will amount to less than 1% of the software we’ll write in the next five years.”

The official recap page groups product announcements across the platform, Copilot, and security. It includes stacked pull requests (“Break large changes into focused, linked pull requests. Review each independently, then merge the full stack in one click.”), GitHub CLI attachments, issue artifacts, Copilot Fusion effort levels (Standard, High, or Max), Copilot Projects, Copilot automations, Copilot connectors, a Security canvas, AI Scan, AI-assisted push protection for unstructured secrets, and package firewall plus reachability analysis. The page also points to the 2026 Octoverse report, and invites people to sign up for news about Universe 2027.

GitHub published the 2026 Octoverse report during Universe. The reporting window is 1 October 2025 through 30 September 2026. Among the official figures:

• “Developers pushed code to GitHub 17.9 billion times in the past 12 months, more than in 2024 and 2025 combined.”
• “Commits across all repo types (public and private) climbed even faster to 34.3 billion, more than three times where they stood two years ago.”
• “Merged pull requests more than tripled to 1.3 billion over the same period, an average of 3.5 million a day.”
• “GitHub now serves more than 225 million” developers.
• “Among repositories created this year, the average repo with an agent configuration file logged eight times as many commits as the average new repo without one.”
• “By September 2026, more than 40% of pull requests on GitHub started with an agent’s first draft, up from 17% in March. That is 110 million in September alone.”
• “GitHub Actions ran a job 1,440 times every second this year. This equals 124 million times a day and is more than three times last year’s total.”
• “In September 2026, 61% of GitHub Copilot users who selected a model themselves used more than one model across their sessions.”

The report also says these figures describe observed, detectable activity, and that “repositories without one [an agent configuration file] may still use AI.”

The Command Line team wrote that Universe ran at “Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, in San Francisco,” and that “Copilot Fusion was clearly the belle of the ball.” It also listed session spotlights, including “Agentic Workflows: Automation at scale,” “Agentic engineering past the pilot: An enterprise playbook,” “Securing MCP,” “Shut the context window! You’re letting the tokens out,” and “Your benchmark is lying: What evals actually look like,” and said there were “150+ sessions at this year’s Universe.”

The close of the post repeats the official framing: “The SDLC is no longer a linear path from planning to coding to testing to deployment. The new agentic software delivery system solves for three things: velocity, intelligence, and quality.”

Emanuele Bartolesi wrote: “I attended GitHub Universe 2026 in person in San Francisco.” He watched both keynotes again after the event. “My takeaway is that GitHub wants to connect the whole delivery workflow, including the parts that happen before an agent writes code and long after it opens a pull request.”

On the opening keynote, he described the Copilot app, Fusion, Projects, session continuity, Automations, Code Review Max, stacked pull requests, and the Git rebuild. He also retained a detail from the second watch: Copilot Dreaming, which “proposed a pull request to update” stale instructions after an application had moved from Java to SvelteKit.

On the closing keynote, he wrote about the hackable conference badge, maintainer controls against low-effort AI pull requests, and a line from Martin Woodward: “Open source is the freedom to inspect, to remix, and to share without asking for permission. But it’s not the freedom to impose your will on others.” He also summarized Maggie Appleton’s GitHub Next prototype, Chopin, as an attempt to move agent planning out of “single-player isolation” and into a shared canvas, because “a pull request is way too late in the lifecycle to ask: ‘Should we even build this?’”

He closed with Woodward’s line: “In this new era, AI doesn’t write the story. You write the story.” His own checklist was: pilot a multi-repo feature with Copilot Projects, “harden the verification gate before scaling agents,” turn on repository guardrails, and “bring planning into the open.”

He also posted the same recap on X: View post. “I went to GitHub Universe in San Francisco, then watched both keynotes again when I got home.”

Jeremy Meiss wrote: “I spent October 27-29 in San Francisco at Universe for World Wide Technology (WWT).” His short version: “the teams getting real results with agents fixed their process first and picked tools second.”

He quoted the official Octoverse figures, and wrote that Mario Rodriguez “said an agent’s value shows up in the software work it finishes,” and “pushed back on the idea that developers get replaced by software factories: Humans set direction. Agents close the loop.”

The post also recounts customer stories presented at the event, including Levi Strauss & Co. mapping its software lifecycle before adding agents, and Trimble building an automated governance system after finding “436 of 439 open source repositories were out of compliance with policy.” Meiss’s own takeaway: “Pick one process. Decide where agents act and where people decide. Instrument all of it.”

He also described the closing-keynote badge demo, in which Martin Woodward “trained a badge inside a plush squirrel to tell a throw from a drop.”

This is a company recap. The author wrote that “two days at GitHub Universe was exciting,” and listed themes that “kept coming up,” including: “The unit of delegation has moved… Now it is a shared automation that fires on an event”; “Coding agents have to be right once. Production agents have to be right every time”; “Autonomy is a given. Guardrails are the next hill to climb”; and “The budget is the new seat in every discussion. Cost per task decides what gets automated.” The post also says the company works on production agents, and invites readers to a Resolve AI webinar.

Cassidy Williams, Senior Director of Developer Experience at GitHub, posted: “It was a fun, hectic week at GitHub Universe, and my newsletter recap for this issue is in vlog form so you can see me running around behind-the-scenes!” The linked recap is a public YouTube video.

“Mandatory @GitHub Universe recap video! #githubuniverse”

On the final day: “The internet is a pretty magical place. One day, you're collaborating with someone through issues, PRs and GitHub discussions. The next, you're standing next to them at @github Universe, talking about everything except code.”

A few days later: “Still processing the fact that I was at GitHub Universe. My first time attending an event this big and ngl, for the first few hours I was just looking around like… how am I even here? Everything felt huge, exciting and a little overwhelming. But somehow, the @github team made…”