Developers want more efficient software. Here’s what over 1,000 GitHub users told us they need.

GitHub partnered with Yale’s Program on Climate Change Communication to poll a thousand active users about climate concerns and software efficiency. The results are striking: 80 % want tools that help write energy‑lean code, 78 % seek best‑practice guidance, and 74 % want ways to quantify their code’s environmental impact. Yet only 10 % believe their day‑to‑day coding can substantially lower their personal carbon footprint, underscoring a gap between awareness and perceived agency. To bridge that gap, GitHub is promoting its Agentic Workflows, specifically the open‑source “Daily Efficiency Improver” that scans repositories for waste in code, data handling, network I/O and front‑end assets, then opens draft pull requests with benchmark data and trade‑off notes. The workflow can be added via the GitHub CLI (`gh aw add-wizard githubnext/agentics/efficiency-improver`) and is positioned as a hypothesis generator rather than an autonomous changer.

The findings sit squarely within a broader industry push to make AI and cloud workloads greener. Recent announcements from AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have introduced carbon‑tracking dashboards and “sustainable compute” credits, while open‑source projects like CodeCarbon and Green‑AI are gaining traction. Developers’ appetite for concrete metrics mirrors the rise of “Sustainable Software Engineering” curricula in universities and the inclusion of environmental KPIs in DevOps pipelines. GitHub’s move to embed efficiency checks directly into the pull‑request workflow could give it a competitive edge over rivals that still rely on third‑party plugins or manual audits.

If GitHub’s Efficiency Improver gains traction, it could standardize how developers surface and justify performance‑related green improvements, turning sustainability into a first‑class engineering concern. However, the survey also warns that many developers fear making unsubstantiated green claims; without robust, reproducible measurements, tools risk becoming token “green‑washing” add‑ons. Watch for adoption metrics on the Agentic Workflow, community feedback on measurement accuracy, and whether enterprise customers begin to tie sustainability KPIs to developer performance reviews.