Today Cursor opened a GitHub. The usual one was down
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Today Cursor put Origin on the street. At 17:08 UTC: “Origin, our code hosting platform, is now live.” Repos, pull requests, a CLI, sync whatever you already have on GitHub. Early beta, on every paid plan.
The same day, from 13:40 UTC, GitHub Status had an incident open. About 20% errors on the web and the API. Half of the archive downloads failing. Actions, PRs, Issues, Pages, webhooks. Copilot, into the evening, was still a major outage.
Someone on X put it in one line: Cursor choosing the best time when github is down to release origin lmao. The joke writes itself. The article doesn’t.
What Origin is
A git forge: the place where the code lives, PRs get opened, reviews happen. It was built by the Graphite team — the review and stacked-diffs company Cursor bought in late 2025. The slogan is “a git forge for the agentic era.” GitHub was designed for humans doing one PR at a time. Origin assumes the thing doing the pushing is agents, by the hundred.
They announced it on 16 June, the same day SpaceX said it was buying Cursor. Back then it was a waitlist and “this fall.” Today it ships. The changelog is drier than the video: your own repos at cursor.com/codebase/…, GitHub sync, PRs with comments going both ways, and the agent on the same screen as the diff.
One detail matters more than the slogan. If you sync a repo, GitHub stays the source of truth. In Origin you browse and pull. Pushes go to GitHub. Depot and Buildkite, the CI they plugged in on day one, run your GitHub Actions. Vercel is there for previews. The “agent-native” features — resolve conflicts, fix a broken CI — are soon.
So: today it is not a replacement. It is a mirror of GitHub with the agent sitting next to it.
Why GitHub is cracking
This is not a bad Monday. On 6 August, Actions was out for about ten hours. At the peak, 71% of workflows failed. This week the status page has had work almost every day.
Volume explains some of it. In all of 2025 GitHub processed a billion commits. This year the weekly pace is already in the hundreds of millions. PRs opened by agents went from about 4 million a month in September to 17 million in March. The 2008 pull request — one human, one change, one review — was not designed for that.
I feel it at home. On the setup I use the code lives on GitHub Pro: the Jitsi plugin, this site, the blog, the private repos. Actions publishes. If GitHub stalls, mine stalls.
What it isn’t
It is not Actions. It is not Issues. It is not Packages. It is not where half the people keep a Moodle plugin. It is not “I’m moving this afternoon.”
It is not a coronation either. GitLab is rebuilding the backend (Project Switch). Zed is proposing something else (DeltaDB). Mitchell Hashimoto wrote it in December: AI companies will become GitHub faster than GitHub becomes an AI company. That does not name a king. It names a bottleneck.
On Friday I wrote that Cursor is now SpaceXAI. The board then was model, CLI, API, bot and the editor. Today they added the warehouse. Still not a throne.
I’m going to try it
Cursor the editor I still don’t use day to day. I stayed in Warp, with Grok Build and Claude in tabs. Origin is on Cursor’s paid plans. I’m not going to invent a review.
I am going to go in. Sync a repo, open a PR, see whether “code and agent in the same place” is a sentence or a change. If it’s vapour, I’ll say so. If it holds, that too. I’ll write it up as I go.
What I will not do is move the plugin or this blog. Origin, today, still syncs against GitHub. If GitHub goes down, the mirror goes down with it.
What I’m taking away
There is no successor today. There is a warning: the infra we all use was designed for a different era, and the stand-in that shipped this afternoon still leans on that infra.
The same “for now” as always. If Origin ends up looking like what they criticise — going down, locking in, watermarking — I’ll leave that too. Meanwhile GitHub Pro is still where the code lives. And from today there is one more place to look.
Sources: Cursor on X, Origin changelog, GitHub Status (17 Aug).