Cursor has launched Origin, a Git-compatible platform designed to handle the increasing volume of code generated by AI agents. This comes as GitHub struggles with reliability issues, logging hundreds of incidents over the past year as commit volume surged. Origin is a significant expansion of Cursor's ambitions, as it now owns more of the underlying development infrastructure. It offers a similar set of features to GitHub, but with a focus on scalability and agent-native capabilities. Origin's launch coincides with GitHub's recent outage, highlighting the need for more reliable code-hosting solutions. The article explores the rise of 'GitHub alternatives' in the face of GitHub's performance issues, including Entire, GitLab's 'Next Generation Source Code Management', and Zed's Delta. While these platforms offer innovative features, they face challenges in competing with GitHub's established position and the pain of switching for enterprises. The author reflects on the potential for these alternatives to gain traction as AI coding tools continue to generate more code, but also acknowledges the difficulty of disrupting GitHub's dominance in the long term.
