AI startup Cursor, now officially part of SpaceX, launched a new code-hosting service called Origin this week. Origin is intended to cover the common developer workflows typically handled on GitHub: collaborative work on codebases, browsing and editing code, managing pull requests, and storing repositories.
Until now Cursor’s main emphasis has been selling automated web development services and its AI Code Editor. The company has said that “agent native” features will arrive for Origin, but has not provided many specifics. Cursor is also building a broader “app ecosystem” to support larger coding efforts within the platform.
A notable design choice is interoperability with GitHub: Origin does not require developers to abandon GitHub. Cursor states that users can keep their GitHub repos alongside those hosted by Cursor; after connecting GitHub to Cursor and picking an organization, developers will see repos available to sync, and Cursor can pull a selected repository in.
The timing of the launch is striking. On the same day Cursor introduced Origin, GitHub experienced a lengthy worldwide outage: the site’s functionality was degraded for more than six hours and, according to reports, the global error rate reached nearly 20 percent.
This is part of a pattern of availability issues for GitHub. Earlier in the year GitHub announced new measures following a spate of outages, and a recent analysis by LeadDev found that the platform suffered 257 outages over the past year. LeadDev’s reporting also notes a visible exodus of high-profile users in response to persistent problems.
Despite these outages, GitHub remains the dominant source-code host. According to GitHub’s own metrics, about 180 million developers used the platform as of last October. Founded in 2007 and acquired by Microsoft in 2012, GitHub continues to be the largest host of source code in the world.
For Cursor, Origin represents a potential foothold in code hosting and collaboration. Whether it can gain significant market share against GitHub’s large user base and entrenched position remains to be seen.
