In a blog post on 6 November, GitHub’s Nick Liffen and Philip Holleran ask whether the growth in commits shows up in developer productivity. A commit is a change saved to a repository. In one week in October, GitHub saw more than 1.2 billion commits, more than it received in the whole of 2025.

The authors ask readers whether they feel 400 per cent more productive than a year ago. Liffen and Holleran do not say how much of the growth in commits comes from AI.

AI speeds up implementation, the authors write, but pressure builds elsewhere. They cite a Faros AI study. According to the study, pull requests – proposed changes submitted for review – spent 441 per cent longer in review when teams went from low to high AI adoption. The blog post does not describe the study’s data or method.

Copilot for planning and building

The guide divides a developer’s work into four stages: Plan, Build, Verify and Observe. For each stage, GitHub offers its AI assistant, Copilot. The feature descriptions are the company’s own.

When planning, a team can use Copilot in Slack or Teams and bring in information from connected tools. Copilot turns agreed requirements into GitHub Issues with acceptance criteria. In Plan Mode it compares implementation approaches, and the developer approves the plan before building starts.

At the build stage, Copilot runs tasks in cloud sandboxes, which are isolated execution environments. Work continues even if the developer closes the laptop. The Copilot app gives each session its own copy of the repository so that parallel tasks do not mix up each other’s changes.

Shortening the review queue from both ends

GitHub says the review queue gets shorter when changes are easier to review and Copilot handles routine work before a human does. Developers can split interdependent work into stacked pull requests that are reviewed separately.

Copilot code review adjusts the depth of its analysis to the change. Agent Merge fixes failing checks, addresses review comments and resolves merge conflicts. Users can also set Copilot to merge a pull request once checks pass.

AI Scan looks for vulnerabilities in languages and files that GitHub’s CodeQL analysis does not cover. GitHub package firewall blocks downloads that violate configured security policies. It is in public preview and so far covers only npm packages.

When investigating production faults, Copilot can use monitoring tools and business data through connectors such as Fabric. With these, it works out which requests or customer groups a fault affects.