Cursor launches Origin, a Git platform built for AI agents, as GitHub falters under load

Cursor, now operating as a SpaceX subsidiary following its acquisition in August, has entered the code-hosting arena with Origin, a Git-compatible repository platform engineered specifically for teams where AI agents write and push code continuously. The platform launched in beta just as GitHub experienced a worldwide outage, highlighting the reliability gaps that Cursor's founding team sees as an opportunity to reshape version control infrastructure.

The timing and the backstory#

Origin's launch capped a journey that began two months earlier when Cursor engineer Tomas Reimers—who previously co-founded Graphite, a code-review startup Cursor acquired in early 2026—previewed the platform at Cursor's developer conference. The timing was dramatic: the same day Elon Musk's company confirmed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, and it remained dramatic at launch, when GitHub went offline for roughly eight hours worldwide.

SpaceXAI's Matt Palmer acknowledged the irony on X, noting that the team had considered shipping earlier but delayed because importing users' GitHub repositories during GitHub's own downtime would have been counterproductive. The outage itself, however, underscored a deeper problem: GitHub's infrastructure has been cracking under the weight of explosive growth. Over the previous 12 months, the platform logged hundreds of incidents as commit volume jumped from 1 billion annually to 1.4 billion monthly. AI agents alone were generating more than 17 million pull requests each month, straining MySQL connections and webhook capacity far beyond what GitHub had historically provisioned for.

"It's not just about normal scaling," GitHub's COO Kyle Daigle acknowledged in an earlier interview with The New Stack. "It's now making sure we can scale at 30 or 40 times" the annual growth rate GitHub had previously designed its systems around.

What Origin does#

Origin lets developers create and host Git repositories directly within Cursor's interface, with a new Codebase tab serving as the hub for these hosted repos. The platform functions as a full Git-compatible service: developers can clone repos locally, add Origin as a remote, and push code from the command line just as they would with GitHub.

Cursor is not pushing an all-or-nothing approach. Users can sync existing GitHub repositories into Origin and view them alongside Cursor-hosted repos, with GitHub remaining the authoritative source for projects that originated there. Origin also includes standard collaboration features—pull requests with diffs, inline comments, checks, and merge controls—all accessible from the browser.