Cursor Launches Origin — Code Hosting to Spite GitHub Amid Outages

Cursor, a company that until now has made its money from its AI code editor, has decided to move into territory new to it. This week it unveiled Origin, a platform for hosting source code that sets out to do everything developers have traditionally turned to GitHub for: collaborate on a codebase, browse and edit it, handle pull requests and store repositories.

The move looks like a logical continuation for a company that is now officially part of SpaceX. Cursor promises that “agent native” features tailored to the work of AI agents will soon come to Origin, though it isn't sharing details yet. On top of that, a broader “ecosystem of apps” is in the works to support team development within the platform.

Not Instead, but Alongside

Interestingly, no one is forcing you to switch to Origin and close your GitHub account. The platform is designed to be compatible: code can be moved between the two services in both directions. “Your repositories on GitHub can sit side by side with the ones Cursor hosts,” the company says in its blog. “Connect GitHub to Cursor, pick an organization — and you'll see the repositories available to sync.” Just point to the one you want, and Cursor will pull it in.

A Well-Chosen Moment

The timing of the launch is telling. On the very day Cursor unveiled Origin, GitHub suffered yet another large-scale outage: for more than six hours the service ran with disruptions, and the global error rate climbed to nearly 20%. The incident is not an isolated one — earlier this year, after a series of failures, GitHub had already announced measures meant to calm frustrated programmers. According to an analysis by the outlet LeadDev, over the past year the platform has endured 257 outages, which, as its correspondent Charles Humble writes, triggered “a noticeable exodus of prominent users.”

Still, it's too early to call this an even fight. If Cursor is serious about competing with GitHub, there's plenty of work ahead. By GitHub's own figures, as of October last year roughly 180 million developers were using its platform. The service, founded in 2007 and bought by Microsoft in 2012, remains the largest source code host in the world — and even a string of high-profile outages has yet to change that picture.

Source: TechCrunch