India to dethrone US for dev numbers as AI reshapes coding, says GitHub

TypeScript was ranked top programming language

The Indian software developer community will outgrow the US's by 2030, GitHub's Octoverse 2025 report shows. However, today, the United States remains in the lead.

The repo platform's latest study also details how AI is reshaping the developer world, from the choice of languages and projects to how coders are incorporating the technology into their own workflows.

The Trump administration has made keeping the US tech edge – particularly around AI – a cornerstone of its economic and defense policy. In good news for the States, GitHub's numbers show that the country has been a "steady number one" in terms of developer population for the last five years, with a current coding community of 28 million.

But India will add another 35.6 million-plus devs between now and 2030, taking it to 57.5 million or more, ahead of the projected 54.7 million calling the US home. The report noted that growth in APAC, including India, was being fueled by government skilling and AI-assisted local language tooling.

Brazil is projected to be the third biggest community, growing from 6.9 million developers today to 19.6 million. China will hit 17.7 million in the same period.

And what will these surging global development communities be focused on? They'll be working on AI, of course, with the much-hyped technology reshaping how developers work and what they work on.

TypeScript took the number one language spot in August, according to GitHub, with the number of contributors using the language growing 66 percent year-on-year to over 1 million. Python came second with 850,000 contributions, while JavaScript took the bronze spot at 427,000.

"This caps a decade-long trend of developers shifting toward typed JavaScript and signals a new default for modern development," GitHub reported.

This growth was "driven by frameworks that scaffold projects in TypeScript by default and by AI-assisted development that benefits from stricter type systems." Typed languages make agent-assisted code "more reliable in production."

GitHub noted that other indices use different methodologies. The long-running Tiobe Index currently has Python in the top slot.

AI is "part of the everyday workflow" for developers, GitHub said, with the number of AI-related repositories topping 4.3 million, almost doubling over the last two years.

And coders are diving into Copilot from the beginning, with 80 percent of new users deploying the technology in their first week on the platform. This means that it's no longer something experienced programmers grow into, argued GitHub, "but part of the default developer experience."

GitHub also claimed scale was replacing hype, with 1.13 million public repos depending on generative AI SDKs, up 178 percent on the year, while projects had shifted from "experimentation to shipping."

Agentic tools are now being adopted in day-to-day workflows – GitHub's own Copilot coding agent hit GA this year. The researchers said "coding agent activity is skewed toward repositories with more stars, larger size, and greater age." This suggests the technology is being applied to established projects as well as experiments.

"Generative AI projects continue to be among GitHub's most popular," with new repos "racking up star counts that took other projects a decade to accumulate."

The researchers also flagged the rapid rise of MCP, which "shows the community coalescing around interoperability standards." Meanwhile, projects like ollama and ragflow show how local inference and AI-augmented pipelines are becoming part of the mainstream.

But GitHub insisted the story of 2025 isn't about AI versus developers. "It's about the evolution of developers in the AI era where they orchestrate agents, shape languages, and drive ecosystems."

Those seem like reassuring words, unless you're a developer at one of the companies that is racing to replace human devs with AI. ®