GitHub publishes 384 APIs on the network — the largest single-provider surface in the developer-tools cohort. It scores a composite of 72.4 in the exemplar band, with an agent-readiness score of 59.5 (agent-ready). Its agentic-access contract enumerates 2,431 operations, of which 1,203 are acting and 31 are marked human-in-the-loop.
Half the platform writes. That is the number worth sitting with.
What is in the surface
The catalog carries GitHub’s specs one resource at a time: Events, Feeds, Gists, Issues, Licenses, Markdown, Meta, Notifications, Projects, Repos, Search, Users, Checks, Deployments, Releases, Pages, Packages, Billing, Migrations, Secret Scanning, Commits, Reactions — and 360 more. Tagged areas are Code, Pipelines, Platform, Software Development, and Source Control.
That decomposition is not cosmetic. A 384-entry surface split by resource is navigable; the same surface as one monolithic document is not. GitHub has spent years splitting its REST reference this way and the machine-readable artifacts inherited the structure.
The facet spread is the story
| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Operational transparency | 92.1 |
| Contract quality | 81.7 |
| Commercial clarity | 73.7 |
| Developer ergonomics | 71.7 |
| Discoverability | 59.3 |
| Governance | 41.7 |
Operational transparency at 92.1 is near the ceiling. GitHub tells you when things break, what changed, and when a thing is going away — a status page, a changelog, and deprecation notices that arrive before the deprecation. Very few providers at any size hit ninety on that facet.
Governance at 41.7 is the outlier, and it is the gap you would not guess from the outside. A platform this large publishes remarkably little about how its API surface is governed — style rules, review process, the machine-readable ruleset that keeps 384 definitions consistent. The consistency is clearly there. The published evidence of how it is enforced is not.
Discoverability at 59.3 on the company that hosts most of the world’s OpenAPI files is its own kind of irony.
What 1,203 acting operations means
An agent pointed at GitHub can create, modify, and delete across repositories, issues, deployments, and packages. 31 operations carry a human-in-the-loop marker — a tiny fraction of 1,203.
That ratio is honest rather than alarming: most GitHub writes are recoverable. A bad issue comment is deletable, a bad commit is revertable. But a platform where half the operations mutate state deserves more than 31 flagged pauses, and the ones that matter — force pushes, branch deletion, secret rotation — are exactly where an agent should stop and ask.
Takeaway
384 APIs, 2,431 operations, half of them acting, and a facet profile that says GitHub is excellent at telling you what happened and quiet about how it governs itself. The contracts are strong enough that the governance gap reads as undocumented practice rather than absent practice — which is a fixable problem, and a scored one.
See the full profile at apis.io/providers/github/.