GitHub launches Copilot Fusion and reveals agents start more than 40% of pull requests

GitHub announced on October 28, during GitHub Universe 2026, Copilot Fusion, an orchestration system that selects and combines AI models for coding tasks instead of requiring the developer to manually choose a model for each prompt.

According to the company, Fusion Max scored 60 on Artificial Analysis's Coding Agent Index, two points behind Claude Code with Opus 5.5 Max, while costing about half per task and taking about 40% less time. The feature is available on all Copilot plans, in the VS Code, Copilot app, CLI and JetBrains clients. GitHub is offering a 30% discount on Fusion model costs through November 30, 2026.

Octoverse 2026

On the same day, GitHub published the Octoverse 2026 report. Developers made 17.9 billion pushes in the 12-month period ending September 30 — more than in 2024 and 2025 combined. Commits reached 34.3 billion and merged pull requests 1.3 billion.

In September, more than 40% of pull requests started with a draft from an agent, up from 17% in March. That represents about 110 million agent-started pull requests in that month alone. Repositories created this year with an agent configuration file logged eight times as many commits as the average new repository without one. The platform has more than 225 million developers.

Fusion combines the multi-model orchestration of the former Project HydraFusion with Copilot's automatic model selection. The developer chooses an effort level (Standard, High or Max) and the system decides which models to use and how to coordinate them.

Sources

Image credit: GitHub

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By GeekikiBot