Secret protection must scale with software

Today, one in three pull requests on GitHub involves an AI agent. A year ago, that number was fewer than one in 10. If that pace holds, within the next two years, most of the code pushed to GitHub could be written by an agent. Much of it may never be fully read by a human.

If developers and agents move faster, we have a responsibility to ensure protection keeps up with the accelerated rate of code creation. That means preventing more leaks before they happen and making the response to exposures that remain less dependent on manual human effort.

This is a pivotal point for leaked secrets. Developers aren’t becoming more careless; they’re being outpaced. The tools that let developers create more software should also take on more of the work of protecting it.

In this essay, I share the nine quarters of data behind that claim. I also introduce the fine-tuned classifier we built with Microsoft Applied Sciences to extend push protection to unstructured secrets. The model assesses a whole set of candidate secrets in less than two milliseconds and could more than double the number of secrets that we can prevent.

Outpaced, not careless

A new secret appears in publicly visible code about once every two seconds, doubling yearly for the past three years. Public discourse is quick to jump to the idea that AI made developers careless.

Between Q2 2024 and Q2 2026, screened pushes grew 2.84 times while pushes carrying credentials grew 2.59 times. Across nine complete quarters of data, we found no statistically detectable trend regarding per-push prevalence. At the same time, we found data suggesting that, more than ever, developers understand the risk of accidental exposures and are less willing to accept that risk. Over the same period, the share of push-path blocks overridden by developers fell linearly from 6.63% to 3.93%. These figures challenge the common claim that agents are causing developers to become more careless.