This year's Octoverse Report reveals how AI is expanding on GitHub and that Python has now overtaken JavaScript as the most popular language on GitHub. The use of Jupyter Notebooks has also surged.

GitHub presented its first State of the Octoverse Report in 2016, see, GitHub Octoverse Reveals The State Of Open Source ahead of the second ever GitHub Universe conference. Since then both Octoverse and Universe have been on an annual basis.

The headline of this year's Octoverse report is, "AI leads Python to top language as the number of global developers surges" and it discusses how growing AI activity on GitHub has caused Python to be the most used language when all activity is taken into account. The third trend it highlights is the rapidly growing number of developers outside the USA especially in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, something we'll look at in a future item.  

As the Octoverse report points out, while there has been anxiety about AI replacing developers, the data on GitHub usage tells a different story - that developers are increasingly building AI models into applications and engaging with AI projects on GitHub in large numbers. 

In 2024, developers on GitHub created over 70,000 new public and open source generative AI projects, representing a 98% year on year increase and bringing the total of gen AI projects to 137,000. 

The Octoverse Report comments:

 As developers identify more and more use cases for AI, the role of generative AI models in software development has shifted from helping developers write code to a new building block in developing applications.

Among the shifts in AI development work noted in the report are a trend towards smaller scale models with developers working with Meta's LLaMA models; a growing interest in developing AI tools for specialized use cases such as academic research;  and a continued focus on developing AI agents to automate processes and enhance the capabilities of AI agents.

Turning to languages Python has ousted JavaScript as the most popular taking into account all activity across commits, issues, pull requests, comments on issues and pull requests, discussions, pushed code, and reviewed pull requests, etc, a change that is attributed to the generative AI boom since Python is used heavily across machine learning, data science, scientific computing, hobbyist, and home automation fields among others. The report also comments:

"The rise in Python usage correlates with large communities of people joining the open source community from across the STEM world rather than the traditional community of software developers." 

This is reinforced by the finding that use of Jupyter Notebooks also skyrocketed with a 92% spike in usage which the report interprets as indicating a rise in use of Github by  people in data science, AI, machine learning, and academia.

More Information

Octoverse Report

GitHub Octoverse Reveals The State Of Open Source

The Ever Expanding GitHub Octoverse

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