New Zhiyuan Report
Today, programmers worldwide collectively experienced an absurd drama.
At 9:40 AM Eastern Time, GitHub suffered a total meltdown, taking Copilot down with it.
For a grueling 7 hours, with core services paralyzed for 3 of them, developers were brought to a standstill—unable to pull code or use AI.
As luck would have it, on this exact same day, Cursor officially declared war on GitHub!
Following its official integration into SpaceXAI, the original team dropped a brand-new "code hosting platform" called Origin.
What exactly is Origin? Here are the key takeaways:
- Positioning: A Git code hosting platform designed specifically for the Agent era, deeply integrated with the Cursor editor.
- Core Capabilities: Stacked PRs, merge queues, machine-readable review states, MCP protocol support, and event-driven automation.
- Compatibility: Two-way real-time sync with GitHub, so existing workflows don't need to change.
Starting today, the Origin beta is open to all Pro/Teams/Enterprise paid users.
Originally, it seemed Cursor just wanted to take down VS Code, but now it looks like GitHub is its true "ultimate prey."
Almost simultaneously, Microsoft's stock fell by more than 3%, wiping out over $112 billion in market value in an instant.
Cursor's Version of GitHub is Now Live
Origin isn't just "storing a copy of your code in the Cursor cloud"—it is a fully-fledged Git hosting platform.
In this early beta, it can already do a great deal—
You can create repositories, perform standard Git operations like clone/push/pull, sync repositories from GitHub, browse and search code in the web browser, open PRs, review code, merge, and manage permissions.
It essentially rebuilt the entire core suite of GitHub's actions from scratch.
Using it is also straightforward: simply click "+New" on the new Codebase tab to create a repository.
The page will directly instruct you on how to install the CLI and how to push your local project up.
The name you initially give your codebase will become part of each repository's URL, for example: cursor.com/codebase/acme-corp.
AI Automatic Merging Saves the Need for Human Review
Just like GitHub, repositories in Origin feature PRs, with three main highlights.
- Stacked PRs
Stacked PRs allow you to break a massive change into multiple smaller PRs stacked by dependency, which Origin visualizes using a dependency graph.
This is incredibly crucial for Agents. Agents naturally tend to make bulk code changes; modifying 50 files at once is the norm. Stuffing all of this into a single PR? A human reviewer would be immediately overwhelmed. Stacked PRs dismantle this problem.
- Merge Queue
Imagine 10 different Agents each modifying code in a repository and each submitting a PR. All of them show green CI runs.
Here's the issue: which one do you merge first? After merging one, can you still trust the test results of the remaining 9?
Handling this scenario on traditional GitHub is excruciating, often leading to merge conflicts, CI reruns, and endless rebasing. Origin's merge queue automatically sorts and detects conflicts, ensuring the main branch always stays CI green.
Even more impressively, when encountering conflicting branches across dozens of files, Origin has a built-in AI engine at the merge layer that automatically resolves conflicts, saving the need for manual intervention.
- Machine-Readable Review States
GitHub's review states are inherently designed for humans—essentially a green checkmark plus a text comment.
If an Agent wants to determine whether a PR can be merged, it has to parse the comment content. Origin turns review states into a structured API that Agents can directly read and write, eliminating the guesswork.
One Button to Fully Migrate from GitHub
Most importantly, there's no need to move your old projects over manually; Origin supports direct mirroring of GitHub repositories.
Git history, branches, and tags are all carried over, and PRs can sync both ways.
Initially, upon syncing, GitHub remains the source of truth.
Simply put, the same codebase can exist in many places, but there must be one source of truth: which version prevails in a dispute, where CI pulls from, and which one is recognized for deployment.
For the past twenty years, the "source of truth" for the vast majority of teams worldwide has been in GitHub's hands.
Today, Origin has completely upended this landscape.
By simply clicking "Detach from GitHub," Origin turns the tables, becoming the true "code headquarters"!
This proves that it isn't just slapping a Cursor skin over GitHub. It is genuinely building its own foundation.
This time around, Origin has also connected its App ecosystem, initially integrating with Vercel, Depot, and Buildkite.
Vercel handles automatic preview deployments for each PR, while Depot and Buildkite handle CI—and both can run your existing GitHub Actions workflows.
A Foundation Built for Agents to Run On
Furthermore, Origin natively supports MCP, so Agents can drive the entire forge like an API, unrestricted by the IDE.
As for performance metrics, they are meant to speak to the Agents.
296,000 clones per hour, 81,000 pushes, 22.6 commits per second, global synchronization latency under 400 milliseconds, and an automatic failover of 10 milliseconds.
22 commits per second sounds absurd, but for an army of Agents, it's just right.
The Primary Coding Force is No Longer Human
The fundamental reason Cursor created Origin is that GitHub can no longer keep up with the speed of Agents.
In March of this year, Truell publicly shared an internal metric: 35%-40% of the PRs merged in Cursor were autonomously completed by Agents on cloud virtual machines.
In other words, Agents are opening their own branches, making their own commits, and opening their own PRs.
In contrast, GitHub's workflow—designed in 2008—was built to the bone for "humans."
A person writes code, asks one or two others to review it, lines up for a merge, operating on a rhythm measured in hours and days.
Obviously, Agents don't follow this rhythm. A dozen can flood into a repository simultaneously, operating on a timescale of seconds.
Origin was built precisely for this reality.
Code, PRs, and Agents live in the same place. When writing code in Cursor, an Agent can directly modify code, update PRs, and push branches without needing to jump out to operate another platform.
So, Should You Migrate Today?
Don't rush just yet. In the short term, no team is going to pack up and move their core projects away from GitHub entirely.
However, if you are already using Cursor's cloud Agents to run background tasks, it's worth giving Origin a try.
Moving over is virtually zero-cost: simply click "Detach from GitHub" in the repository settings, and the host and guest reverse roles.
SpaceXAI researchers directly fired a shot across the bow: "GitHub is down, why not check out Origin!"
The day GitHub went down, Cursor opened its doors to guests.
Next time GitHub goes down, you might not need to wait for it to recover.
References:
https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/2089399057659596847?s=20
https://cursor.com/changelog/origin-code-hosting
Editors: Taozi, Moxi