For as long as anyone can remember, GitHub has been the de facto code host of choice for the majority of developers. However, recently the platform has been plagued by widely reported outages and performance degradation, and when the ball drops, the Cursor is waiting to pick it up.
The AI startup, now officially part of SpaceXAI, launched Origin this week. Origin is a new code hosting platform designed to do everything developers would normally do with GitHub. This means collaborating on the codebase, viewing and editing the codebase, handling pull requests (edits made by other users who request additions to the main codebase), and saving to the repository.
This seems like a natural next step for Cursor. Cursor’s main focus so far has been selling automated web development services through its AI code editor. Cursor also says that “Agent Native” functionality will be available in Origin soon, but not many details have been shared yet. The company also said it is building a broader “app ecosystem” to support a wide range of coding efforts within Origin.
Interestingly, when using Origin, users do not have to stop using GitHub. In fact, Origin is designed to help developers work with GitHub and pass code between the two in an interoperable manner.
“Your GitHub repository can sit side-by-side with Cursor-hosted repositories,” Cursor says in its blog. “Connect GitHub to Cursor, select your organization, and it will show you the repositories you can sync. Select one and Cursor will pull it in.”
Origin’s launch coincides with continued complaints about a perceived decline in GitHub services. In fact, on the same day that Cursor announced its new platform, GitHub suffered a very long global outage. The site was reportedly disrupted for more than six hours, with an error rate of nearly 20% worldwide.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened recently. After experiencing back-to-back outages earlier this year, GitHub announced new measures to satisfy disgruntled programmers as availability issues appear to escalate. More broadly, the platform has suffered 257 outages over the past year, according to a recent analysis by LeadDev State. These deep-rooted issues have led to a “visible exodus of high-profile users,” writes LeadDev reporter Charles Humble.
Still, if Cursor wants to compete with GitHub, it’s going to need to do a decent job. According to GitHub’s own metrics, approximately 180 million developers were using its platform as of October last year. The platform was founded in 2007, acquired by Microsoft in 2012, and remains the world’s largest host of source code.
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