So long, Spokes: GitHub rewrites storage to restore reliability, just in time for agentic hordes

Responding to unprecedented demand from AI agents, GitHub is rebuilding its Git storage architecture from scratch.

Early tests with the new architecture show a promising 35x write improvement in internal tests.

GitHub will need a miracle of that proportion just to keep up with customer demand.

The plan involves decoupling writes from reads, offloading maintenance, and letting object storage manage redundancy.

Most impressive is that the redesign is happening under the hood, with the goal of a non-disruptive change that won't alter developer workflows, review processes, or security controls.

Running an enterprise-grade code repository means supporting “large engineering teams running busy CI pipelines alongside growing fleets of agents.

Supporting these teams means building Git infrastructure for sustained, concurrent reads and writes at a scale few repositories reach today,” wrote Brian Celenza, GitHub principal software engineer, in a blog post describing the updates.

Celenza did not offer a timeline for this ambitious migration.

When GitHub’s customers shifted their coding focus to AI agents, activity on the platform spiked significantly.

Between September 2025 and August 2026, GitHub traffic doubled, from 218.2 billion events per month to 473.3 billion.

In September alone, commits hit 7.38 billion, a 5x increase from September 2025.

This shift in traffic is stressing the system.

According to the GitHub Availability Report, the service suffered 10 incidents in April alone that degraded performance.

Another nine incidents landed in May, with each generating more bad publicity than the previous one.