By Karan M V, Director, International Developer Relations, GitHub
India is one of the largest hubs for tech innovation, and the developer community here is surging. With over 18 million developers on GitHub, it’s the second largest in the world—and growing faster than anywhere else. In just a few years, India could have the biggest developer base on the planet.
New tools and technologies are constantly reaching developers, with AI enhancing productivity across their tech stack. The next AI revolution is here: agentic AI. Now, India’s developers are being joined by increasingly advanced AI agents, acting as peer programmers for everyday tasks. Over the last few years, we’ve seen how AI can play the role of ‘co-pilot,’ assisting developers so they can focus on strategic problem-solving and innovation. But like any good co-pilot, AI should also be able to “fly” solo (and code solo!) in certain scenarios—whether that’s reviewing pull requests, fixing security vulnerabilities, or brainstorming solutions to complex coding challenges.
AI agents can perform tasks, make decisions, and adapt to their environment in real time. They learn from data, respond to feedback, and improve over time. Whether working independently or as part of a larger system, these agents continuously evolve, making them powerful tools for automation, problem-solving, and efficiency.
As we enter the age of AI agents, their integration into developer workflows will push productivity gains far beyond what we’ve seen so far purely with generative AI. This shift will unlock massive digital and economic progress, especially for India, where our country’s huge developer Community is at the heart of innovation.
From pair programmers to AI-powered peers
In India, working with agents is already part of daily life—whether it’s food delivery agents, service agents, or logistics agents. Now, AI-powered agents are coming to software development, offering a major productivity boost. Imagine scenarios where you can easily enlist an AI agent to help you with software, just like how you would enlist an agent for daily life!
AI-powered coding tools like GitHub Copilot have already transformed the way developers work, increasing productivity by 55% and beyond. Now, these tools are evolving into agentic peer programmers—fully integrated AI agents that streamline workflows, boost efficiency, and dramatically reduce time-to-production.
As AI agents grow more sophisticated, they will become indispensable to software development, helping developers complete tasks in a fraction of the time. With these capabilities, developers will continue moving up the stack, working at higher levels of abstraction, just as they always have. For India, home to the world’s fastest-growing developer community, this shift will accelerate digital progress and open new economic opportunities. And history has shown: where developers thrive, growth follows.
AI that codes, fixes, and thinks
What will AI agents look like in practice? To be truly effective, these agents need to be predictable, steerable, reliable, and verifiable.
In real-world applications, they won’t just autocomplete code; they’ll:
- Provide autonomous pull request feedback, reviewing, and suggesting improvements.
- Enable self-healing code, detecting and fixing runtime errors automatically.
- Offer command-line intelligence, suggesting and even executing terminal commands
safely and securely to streamline workflows.
All of this translates into significant productivity gains, allowing developers to focus on what truly matters—building, innovating, and solving complex problems. At GitHub, we’re leading this transformation. We recently announced that GitHub Copilot has evolved into an agentic peer programmer, seamlessly integrating into developer workflows to amplify efficiency and accelerate the journey from code to production.
Developers will be the orchestrators of AI agents
As AI agents become more capable, offering deeper insights, automating complex tasks, and streamlining development, developers will remain in control, making decisions critical to their organisation’s goals. They will focus more on the problems that developers solve frequently outside of just coding, like architecture design, algorithm choices, compliance issues, and shipping code.
Rather than replacing developers, AI agents will amplify their capabilities. We see a future where developers act as orchestrators, conducting an ensemble of AI agents—each specialised in different areas, working in harmony to execute tasks efficiently. This fusion of AI and developer creativity will ultimately enable faster, smarter software development. As developers, we’ve already seen this role succeed in other parts of the tech stack—from building containers to orchestrating them in the DevOps ecosystem.
AI agents and India’s future
For India’s developers, this is a moment of opportunity. Those who quickly embrace AI agents won’t just gain a competitive edge in the global market—they’ll play a key role in shaping India’s and the global economic future. The future of software development is agentic, and India’s developers can lead this change. The question is no longer if this transformation will happen, but how quickly developers will adapt. Now is the time to embrace AI agents, innovate, and take the lead.
