is cursor origin a github replacement?

Not for code you already have. Cursor’s own changelog says pushes for synced repositories keep going to GitHub, which stays the source of truth. A Japanese engineer who mirrored his own repo titled his write-up 「Cursor Origin は GitHub を置き換えない」 — Origin does not replace GitHub — and meant it approvingly. You can host natively on Origin, and Origin can host natively; that is a separate and later decision.

did cursor origin go down when github went down?

Cursor’s own status page says yes. On 2026-08-17 it logged “GitHub degradation affecting some Cursor services”, impact major, 14:34–20:40 UTC, and listed Origin among the affected components alongside Automations, Review Agents and Cloud Agents. The important limit: that log covers Cursor’s services and the GitHub sync. It does not tell you how a repo hosted natively on Origin behaved.

how long was the github outage on august 17 2026?

GitHub gives two numbers of its own: its incident timestamps span 7h 35m (13:40:03Z–21:15:46Z, impact critical), while its own resolution note reads “from 13:28–21:15 UTC (7h 47m)… At peak, web/API error rates were approximately 20%”. Cursor’s log gives 6 hours 6 minutes for its own exposure, 14:34 to 20:40. Both are primary and both are right: they measured different things.

what syncs from github to cursor origin?

Measured first-hand on one real repository: commits, branches and tags (83 branches) and pull requests (342 closed ones, whole — bodies, comments, even bot comments, syncing both ways). Issues do not sync — the tab does not exist. GitHub Actions checks and secrets do not. Branch protection does not; Origin has its own rules, but you rebuild them.

does cursor train on your code?

Cursor publishes a Privacy Mode which states: “When enabled, we will not train on your data”, available to anyone, free or Pro. Its security page also publishes a subprocessor list, “re-reviewed annually”, and a SOC 2 Type II report on request. Reports that Cursor publishes no training policy and no subprocessor list are wrong. On data retention this card makes no claim — cursor.com/legal/privacy answered HTTP 200 and was not opened this sweep.

how many outages does github actually have?

GitHub’s own status API returns 50 incidents between 2026-06-17 and 2026-08-20 — 9 critical, 11 major, 29 minor. Cursor’s, same endpoint and method, returns 50 over 2026-06-22 to 2026-08-19 — 3 critical, 10 major, 37 minor. Both are primary and both cap at 50. The widely-quoted “257 outages in a year” is verifiable and verified: LeadDev (2026-05-07), from IncidentHub’s tracked dataset — 257 incidents May 2025–April 2026, 48 major, 112 hr 18 min of major-outage downtime, and on the same index GitLab 132, Bitbucket 27. An earlier draft of this card said it could not be checked; the status API was simply the wrong instrument, since its records begin four months after that window ends.

what did developers actually recommend instead of github?

In Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub (2026-08-17, 639 points, 421 comments), the names that came up were Forgejo (60 comments), GitLab (50), Gitea (49) and Codeberg (43). Cursor was named in 10. The counts are comments containing each term; 8 of the 10 genuinely name Cursor Origin and two mean the editor, so 10 is a ceiling.

when was cursor origin announced?

2026-06-16, at Cursor’s first developer event, as “a git forge for the agentic era”, with a waitlist and an autumn target. The initial beta shipped on 2026-08-17 — the day GitHub had a critical outage. The coincidence is in the beta date, not in the product’s existence; Cursor’s own staff said they had meant to ship earlier.

Switch card · CODE HOSTING

GitHub ⇄ Cursor Origin

CONFIDENCE: LOW· updated 2026-08-20· n=1 unaffiliated first-hand, 16 sources on the face, 25-row ledger· vendor content discounted

· THE VERDICT ·

Swept 2026-08-20 with agent-reach. Numbers locked before prose.
Both vendors’ own status logs. Both say the same thing.
Three days in, four hands-on accounts. One is unaffiliated.

no vendor money · every claim sourced · 2026-08-20

This is a ⇄, not a migration — and on this card that is not a hedge, it is what the vendor built. Cursor’s own changelog says pushes for synced repos “keep going to GitHub, which stays the source of truth for anything started there”. A Japanese engineer who synced his own repository titled his write-up 「Cursor Origin は GitHub を置き換えない」 — Origin does not replace GitHub — and meant it as praise for the design. So the two questions come apart: should I mirror? is cheap, reversible and mostly a matter of taste. Should I move the source of truth? is a different decision, and every first-hand account in this card’s corpus says the same thing about it: not yet. This card does not rank the two products. It reports what each vendor logged, what one engineer counted when he synced 342 pull requests, and which claims remain unmeasured across all 25 sources in its ledger.

The fact that decides it, and both vendors published it themselves. On 2026-08-17 GitHub logged “Incident with GitHub.com”, impact critical, 13:40:03Z–21:15:46Z. The same day Cursor shipped Origin and the week’s headlines called it a GitHub alternative. Cursor’s own status page logged this: “GitHub degradation affecting some Cursor services”, impact major, 14:34:00Z–20:40:02Z, and its affected-components list reads ['Automations', 'Review Agents', 'Cloud Agents', 'Origin']. The alternative was degraded by the thing it is an alternative to, on launch day, by its own record. What that does not say, and it should not be stretched to: neither log tells you how a repo created natively on Origin behaved. What it does tell you is that the sync — the feature that makes trying Origin cost nothing — is a live dependency on GitHub’s API.

The decision

CHOOSE ORIGIN IF →

You want a better review surface and you are not moving your code. Syncing costs close to nothing and is reversible: a Japanese engineer who mirrored his own repository reports 83 branches and 342 closed pull requests arriving whole — bodies, comments, even bot comments — with comments syncing both ways. His own summary of the trade: “試すのはコストがほぼゼロ。ミラーなので壊れないし、やめても GitHub 側は無傷” (trying it costs almost nothing; it is a mirror, so nothing breaks, and if you stop, GitHub is untouched).
Your team writes real pull-request descriptions. Origin’s headline review feature, Code Tour, was tested across three of one engineer’s own PRs: a long written body produced a full summary with review points; a two-line body produced 「No matching steps」 — nothing at all; a third claimed “Empty diff” and then guessed from the branch name. His conclusion: “材料がなければ何も出ない” — it reformats a description that exists, it does not write one from the diff. This is a multiplier on a habit, not a substitute for it.
You are running many agents at once and feel the write bottleneck. That is the case Origin was announced for — 2026-06-16, as “a git forge for the agentic era”, two months before the beta. Its unit is not the pull request but a change, a versioned diff, and draft is enforced by the model rather than by configuration. But the load figures behind that pitch — 22.6 commits/sec, ~296,000 clones/hour — are Cursor’s own demo numbers, and the engineer who ran a real PR through the product says plainly he could not verify them.
Your reason is GitHub’s reliability, and you have looked at the record rather than the headlines. Run the same query against both vendors, because one of these numbers is meaningless without the other. GitHub’s status API returns 50 incidents, 2026-06-17 to 2026-08-20 (~64 days) — 9 critical, 11 major. Cursor’s, same endpoint and same method, returns 50 incidents, 2026-06-22 to 2026-08-19 (~59 days) — 3 critical, 10 major. Both files hit the same 50-record cap; Cursor fills it in a shorter window. Fewer of Cursor’s are critical — and exactly one incident in that entire file names Origin, because Origin only entered beta on 2026-08-17, three days before this sweep. An earlier draft of this card published GitHub’s number alone. The much-repeated “257 outages in a year” is real — LeadDev, 2026-05-07, from IncidentHub’s tracked data: 257 incidents May 2025–April 2026, 48 of them major, against GitLab 132 and Bitbucket 27 on the same index. An earlier draft of this card said it could not be verified, and was wrong. Cursor has, across this card’s 25 sources, no twelve-month figure — Origin is four months younger than that window.

CHOOSE GITHUB IF →

You were going to move because the press called Origin a GitHub alternative. In Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub — the thread where people were actually asked — Cursor is named in 10 of 421 comments. Forgejo is named in 60, GitLab in 50, Gitea in 49, Codeberg in 43. The answer developers gave was self-hosted forges, by five to six times. (Counts are comments containing the term, walked from the thread. On inspection 8 of the 10 “cursor” hits genuinely name Cursor Origin — the other two mean the editor — so 10 is a ceiling. An earlier draft blamed a git origin collision; there are none in the thread.)
You depend on Issues, Actions or branch protection. None of the three comes across the sync. Measured first-hand on one real repository: Issues — “the tab does not exist”; Actions checks and secrets — the Checks column stays “No checks”; branch protection — “No rulesets protect this repository yet”. Origin has its own protection rules you can build, but they are rebuilt, not imported.
You need a merge gate on day one. A first-hand test found draft status enforced by the model itself — Mergeable: no, blocker change-is-draft, with no rulesets configured. And then the reverse: the moment draft was lifted, “Mergeable: yes” with zero checks reported and “CI passing: yes” — “何も無ければ通過扱い”, nothing configured is treated as passing. Bare Origin stops nothing after a change is marked ready. There is also no Actions-equivalent in the product; CI arrives through Apps.
You want the data terms first. The engineer who mirrored his own repo put it as the reason not to move yet, listing 「保持期間、保管場所、学習への利用、サブプロセッサ、移行ツール」 as unpublished. Two of his five are wrong, and we checked rather than repeating him: Two widely-repeated claims about Cursor publishing nothing are false, and this card checked: its security page publishes a subprocessor list “re-reviewed annually” and a training policy — “When enabled, we will not train on your data”, free tier included — plus SOC 2 Type II on request. What we did not establish either way is a stated retention period; cursor.com/legal/privacy answered HTTP 200 and was not opened this sweep, so this card makes no claim about it.
You are running an open-source project. Nothing in this sweep suggests Origin replaces the parts of GitHub an OSS project lives on — Issues do not sync at all, and stars, forks and discussions were not found in any first-hand account here.

Works with your setup?

	Who is source of truth	Issues sync	Actions sync	Branch protection imported	Merge gate out of the box	Public status log	Independently load-tested
GitHub	✓ itself	✓ n/a — native	✓ n/a — native	✓ n/a — native	✓ checks + protection	✓ per-incident API	⚠ not assessed here
Cursor Origin (synced repo)	✗ GitHub stays source of truth	✗ tab does not exist	✗ “No checks”	✗ rebuilt, not imported	⚠ draft blocks; ready does not	✓ per-incident API	✗ vendor demo figures only
Cursor Origin (native repo)	✓ Origin	⚠ not observed this sweep	✗ CI via Apps	⚠ rules exist; not tested here	⚠ same draft/ready behaviour	✓ per-incident API	✗ vendor demo figures only

Sentiment — independent voices only

Unaffiliated first-hand accounts found · 1

There is no sentiment bar on this card, and the reason is the finding. Three days after a launch announcement with 25.9 million views, this sweep found four hands-on write-ups of Origin in any language. One is a Cursor Ambassador (his Qiita profile: “Cursor Ambassador Regional Leader(East Asia)”). One carries a Cursor referral link twice, under a visible 広告 — advertising — label. One is a translation of someone else’s video, by its own description. That leaves one unaffiliated first-hand account, and his conclusion is that it is too early to move. A proportional bar over one voice would be fake precision, so this card does not draw one — the two vendors’ own status logs carry the verdict instead. Both earlier drafts of this card counted the affiliated voices, once at n=3 and once at n=2, before a verifier fetched their pages. That is why rule ③ now exists.

Weighted evidence

The alternative was taken down by the thing it is an alternative to, on launch day, and both vendors logged it. GitHub, in its own incident feed: “Incident with GitHub.com”, impact critical, 2026-08-17T13:40:03.629Z → 21:15:46.623Z — 7h 35m. Cursor, in its own: “GitHub degradation affecting some Cursor services”, impact major, 14:34:00Z → 20:40:02Z, affected components ['Automations', 'Review Agents', 'Cloud Agents', 'Origin'], with the update reading “related to a GitHub degradation reported in GitHub’s status page”. Neither log, however, says how a natively-hosted Origin repo behaved — this is a fact about the sync layer, and we are not stretching it further. githubstatus.com · incident API · read 2026-08-20 · status.cursor.com · incident API · read 2026-08-20
The week’s headlines said “GitHub alternative”. The thread where people were actually asked said something else. Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub, 2026-08-17 — 639 points, 421 comments carrying text, walked from the thread itself. Named in those comments: Forgejo 60, GitLab 50, Gitea 49, Codeberg 43… and Cursor 10. The answer developers gave was self-hosted forges, by five to six times. Two limits, stated: each figure is comments containing the term, and 8 of those 10 genuinely name Cursor Origin and two mean the editor, so 10 is a ceiling; and this is one thread on one site on one day. HN 49331033 · 639 pts / 421 comments-with-text · as read 2026-08-20 · counts re-derived by walking the item tree; a search-query method gives materially different numbers
What does not come across the sync, counted on a real repository rather than read off a feature list. A Japanese engineer mirrored his own repo and recorded what arrived: 83 branches, and 342 closed pull requests whole — bodies, comments, even bot comments, syncing both directions. What did not arrive: Issues — “そもそもタブが存在しない”, the tab does not exist; GitHub Actions checks and secrets — the Checks column stays “No checks”; branch protection — “No rulesets protect this repository yet”. Origin has its own protection rules, but they are rebuilt, not imported. kt-tech.blog · Koki · 2026-08-19 · read 2026-08-20
A merge gate that is stricter than GitHub in one direction and absent in the other. Running a real refactoring PR through Origin, an engineer found draft enforced by the product itself — “rulesetをひとつも作っていないのに…Mergeable: no…blockerは change-is-draft”, on a repository where he had created no rulesets. Then the reverse: “`origin pr ready`でdraftを外した瞬間、Mergeable: yes になりました。checksは1件も報告されていないのに CI passing: yes です” — nothing configured is treated as passing. Bare Origin stops nothing once a change is marked ready. He also notes that an Actions-equivalent is absent from the product itself — CI arrives through Apps such as Depot and Buildkite — and that request changes was not implemented at the time he tested. qiita.com · Kinopee · 2026-08-17 · read 2026-08-20 · ⚠ the author is a Cursor Ambassador (Regional Leader, East Asia) — disclosed on his profile and in the article’s author block; quoted because his findings run against that interest, but not counted in this card’s roster
The headline review feature degrades to nothing without a written description — tested across three of one engineer’s own pull requests. A long, written body produced a full summary with review points. A two-line body produced 「No matching steps」 — nothing at all. A third claimed “Empty diff”, then displayed two files’ changes and guessed “likely a portfolio feature” from the branch name, in English. His conclusion: “材料がなければ何も出ない” — Code Tour reformats a description that exists; it does not write one from the diff. kt-tech.blog · Koki · 2026-08-19 · three PRs from his own repository, each named
The date the coverage got wrong, and it changes the story. The week’s framing was opportunism — one headline reads “capitalizes on GitHub frustration”. But Origin was announced on 2026-06-16, at Cursor’s first developer event, as “a git forge for the agentic era”, with a waitlist and an autumn target. The August event is the beta of a June announcement. Cursor’s Matt Palmer, quoted at launch, says the opposite of opportunism: “We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down.” The coincidence is real, but it is a coincidence of the beta date, not of the product’s existence. ai-souken.com · 2026-06-17 · read 2026-08-20 · the announcement date; its adoption-survey figures are third-party and are NOT used here · techcrunch.com · 2026-08-18 · the framing being corrected
The sharpest reading of this launch got nine likes. Posted 2026-08-19, the day before this card verified the same thing at both status pages: “every headline called it a GitHub alternative. Their own changelog is more careful than that… for code that already exists, Origin is a very good client sitting on top of GitHub rather than a replacement for it… It just means the thing being called a GitHub alternative had a six hour outage on launch day because GitHub had one.” He is not hostile to it — the same post says “None of this makes Origin bad. New repos hosted there are a real alternative, and meeting people where their code already lives is a sensible way to launch.” 9 likes, against 25.9 million views on the launch announcement. x.com · @airealitynoslop · 2026-08-19 · 9 likes / 1,336 views as read 2026-08-20 · analysis, not a usage report — quoted, not counted in n · the launch post · 25,438 likes / 25.9M views
The Chinese-language counter-case names the same weakness from a different direction. “Cursor 想替代 GitHub，结果翻车了” — Cursor wanted to replace GitHub and came unstuck. The argument: 「Cursor 嘴上说要替代 GitHub，但它的双向同步实时绑在 GitHub 的 API 上…这是入场券，也是命门」 — the bidirectional sync is bound in real time to GitHub’s API; it is the entry ticket and the fatal spot at once. And: 「现在的 Origin 只有前端，地基还在别人院子里」 — right now Origin is only a front end, the foundation is still in someone else’s yard. The same author is even-handed about the direction: “我倾向认为方向是对的”. 小红书 · 神经网络 · 2026-08-19 · read 2026-08-20 · signed URL expires; durable key: note 6a857a360000000005023db0 + 「这是入场券，也是命门」
Two claims that Cursor publishes nothing are false, and this card checked before repeating them. A widely-cited report says Cursor has published “no subprocessor disclosures, no training-use policy”. Its own security page, read 2026-08-20: “Our list of subprocessors is published on our trust portal”, each “evaluated under our vendor risk management program and re-reviewed annually”; and Privacy Mode — “When enabled, we will not train on your data” — available to “anyone (free or Pro)”. Also SOC 2 Type II on request. What we did not settle: the security page states no retention period, and cursor.com/legal/privacy answered HTTP 200 but was not opened this sweep, so this card makes no claim about retention in either direction. cursor.com/security · read 2026-08-20 · ⚠ vendor — used for what the vendor does and does not publish, never for the verdict
The most enthusiastic hands-on write-up we found carries a referral link, and we counted it before we checked. A Japanese setup walkthrough syncs a real repository end to end and reports the appeal plainly — the round trip between editor, GitHub and deploy dashboard collapses into one page, and branch-protection rules are available inside Origin even in early beta. It also carries a Cursor referral link twice, under “start Cursor from this advantageous invitation link” and “sign up through the link below and your first month is half price”. The same blog’s homepage carries none, so it is specific to this article, and Origin is on paid plans, so the referral is for the very product being recommended. In fairness to the author: he discloses it. The article carries a visible 広告 — advertising — label directly under the title, and a referral code pays in account credit while giving the reader a discount. A disclosed stake is still a stake, which is why he is not counted; it is not a concealed one, and this card should not imply otherwise. This card counted him as its only positive voice until a verifier fetched the page. He is now quoted and not counted. The branch-protection observation still stands, with the distinction this card keeps: rules existing in Origin and rules importing from GitHub are different claims, and only the first is supported. tomyunser.com · 2026-08-18 · read 2026-08-20
A 10,002-file stress test exists — and it is not what it appears to be. A B站 video reports creating a repo, driving the Origin CLI through PR, comment and merge, then loading 10,002 files: 「界面只展示前 500 个文件」 (the interface shows only the first 500), performance degrades as the count rises, and 「Origin 仍处于早期产品阶段，暂不能作为成熟的 GitHub 替代方案」 — still an early-stage product, not yet a mature GitHub replacement. But its own description names a YouTube original: this is a translation, not an independent test. We cite it as a translated report and exclude it from this card’s count — the finding may well be sound, but it is not this uploader’s finding. bilibili · BV15tb667E4a · 星小脉 · 2026-08-18 · 1,095 views as read 2026-08-20 · uploader description only; subtitle track not checked, so no spoken content is quoted

Show all 16 sourcesShow fewer

Both outage records, from both primaries, with the primaries’ own limit. GitHub’s status API returns 50 incidents spanning 2026-06-17 to 2026-08-20 — 9 critical, 11 major, 29 minor; by month, June 6, July 26, August 18. Cursor’s returns 50 too, spanning 2026-06-22 to 2026-08-19 — 3 critical, 10 major, 37 minor — filling the same cap in five fewer days, with one incident naming Origin. Both endpoints cap at 50 records, which is why the twelve-month picture has to come from elsewhere — and it exists: LeadDev, 2026-05-07, from IncidentHub’s tracked dataset, 257 GitHub incidents May 2025–April 2026, 48 of them major, 112 hr 18 min of major-outage downtime, against GitLab 132 and Bitbucket 27 on the same index. An earlier draft of this card said that figure could not be verified. It was wrong, and its reason was wrong: the status API’s records begin four months after that window closes. Across the 25 sources in this ledger no twelve-month figure exists for Cursor, because Origin is younger than the window. githubstatus.com · read 2026-08-20 · techcrunch.com · 2026-08-18 · where the 257 figure is relayed · leaddev.com · Charles Humble · 2026-05-07 · blog.incidenthub.cloud · the dataset · read 2026-08-20
The vendor’s performance numbers are demo numbers, and the engineer closest to the product says so. 22.6 commits/sec, ~296,000 clones/hour, sub-400ms global sync — repeated across the week’s coverage and dozens of posts. They come from Cursor’s June stage demo. The engineer who actually ran a pull request through Origin writes: “『エージェント数十本の同時負荷に耐える』という肝心の部分も、公表されているのはデモの域で、自分では検証できていません” — the crucial claim, withstanding dozens of concurrent agents, is demo-grade and he could not verify it himself. Across the 25 sources in this card’s ledger, no one has reproduced them outside a Cursor demo. qiita.com · Kinopee · 2026-08-17 · ⚠ Cursor Ambassador — quoted, not counted
What “default on” actually means, corrected by someone who checked. The rollout was widely reported as opt-out rather than opt-in, which is true — and easy to misread. The engineer who synced his own repo makes the distinction: default-on means the feature is available, not that repositories are mirrored for you. “`Sync from GitHub` を自分で押すまで一覧は空でした” — the list stayed empty until he pressed the button himself. He still flags the organisational point: an admin who has not decided whether company code may sit on a new host is now one click away from it being able to. kt-tech.blog · Koki · 2026-08-19
Measured latencies, for what they are worth on a beta. git push cursor 1.6s; origin pr create 3.1s; push-to-PR in seconds, with the versioned snapshot, draft control and Code Tour working with nothing configured. One engineer, one repository, one day — but it is the only measured timing in this corpus that is not a vendor figure. qiita.com · Kinopee · 2026-08-17
A launch partner is not an independent voice, and the best line of the week came from one. Vercel’s CEO, whose company shipped as a day-one Origin integration: “You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel. And unlike GitHub, it’s online 😁” — 4,515 likes. It is funny, it is quotable, and it is a partner endorsing a launch he is part of. Quoted here for the dependency it accidentally describes; excluded from this card’s count. x.com · @rauchg · 2026-08-17 · 4,515 likes as read 2026-08-20 · ⚠ Vercel is a day-one Origin integration partner

Why confidence is LOW

Cursor's own status page listed Origin as degraded — on launch day GitHub's own log: critical, 13:40:03Z→21:15:46Z, 7h 35m Cursor's own log: major, 14:34→20:40, and it names GitHub as the cause “Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub” — Cursor named in 10 of 421 comments Forgejo 60 · GitLab 50 · Gitea 49 · Codeberg 43 — the actual answers 342 PRs and 83 branches sync. Issues, Actions and branch protection don't after `origin pr ready`: “CI passing: yes” with zero checks reported Origin was announced 2026-06-16 — the beta date is the coincidence 4 hands-on accounts exist: 2 Cursor-affiliated, 1 a repost, 1 clean GitHub 257 incidents in a year (48 major) · GitLab 132 · Bitbucket 27

Coverage — what we read, what we skipped

Swept 2026-08-20 with agent-reach, numbers locked before any prose was written. get_status under-reported again — it printed 3/16 个渠道可用 and listed Reddit and Twitter/X as not installed, immediately before both returned results. That is the fourth time this project has recorded it. Read and used: both vendors’ status APIs, Hacker News (the 421-comment thread walked comment-by-comment rather than counted by search), Cursor’s own security page, Twitter/X, Reddit, 小红书 (19 notes surfaced), B站, and six Japanese sources — which is where all three first-hand hands-on accounts came from. Tested rather than assumed: a widely-repeated report says Cursor publishes no subprocessor list and no training policy. One fetch of its security page refutes both, and this card says so even though it cuts against the sceptical read. The same report’s claims about data retention and migration tooling we did not test, so they appear nowhere on this card. Run for both sides after a verifier caught it one-sided: the incident count. GitHub 50 records / 9 critical / 11 major over 64 days; Cursor 50 / 3 / 10 over 59. An earlier draft published only GitHub’s. A claim this card got wrong and has withdrawn: an earlier draft said five times that the “257 outages in a year” figure could not be verified. It can. LeadDev published it on 2026-05-07 from IncidentHub’s dataset, which states its methodology and carries a cross-forge comparison (GitHub 257, GitLab 132, Bitbucket 27, May 2025–April 2026). Our stated reason was wrong too: the status API caps at 50 records beginning 2026-06-17, four months after that window closes, so it was never the instrument that could settle it. What genuinely lacks a counterpart across these 25 sources is Cursor’s twelve-month figure, because Origin is younger than the window — and that blank is about the product’s age, not its reliability. Cursor’s demo throughput figures — across these 25 sources no one has reproduced them, including the engineer who ran a real pull request through the product. Not attempted, and therefore not gaps: 掘金, 知乎, V2EX, LinkedIn, YouTube, cursor.com/legal/privacy (HTTP 200, not opened), and first-hand Gitea or Forgejo metrics — the last matters, because Forgejo and Gitea are what the Ask HN thread actually recommended and this card does not measure them. One fetch returned something other than it promised: docs.cursor.com/en/origin answers HTTP 200 but renders the generic documentation index rather than an Origin page. That is recorded as what we received — not as evidence that Origin is undocumented. What would change this card: anyone reproducing the 22.6-commits/sec figure outside a Cursor demo; a stated retention period for natively-hosted repositories; and a first-hand account of how a native Origin repo behaved during a GitHub outage, which is the one thing the two status logs cannot tell you.

Show every source we read (25) Hide the ledger

The 25 sources in this card's ledger — 16 of them quoted above. Sources we read and did not quote are listed too, with why. This is the ledger, not a claim of exhaustiveness: anything the sweep read but deliberately left out of it is named in the coverage note above, with the reason. Reliability and neutrality are our own scores, not the publisher's. Vendor-owned pages are marked in the notes and never carry the verdict.

GitHub Status API — www.githubstatus.com/api/v2/incidents.json primary-vendor-log reliability 99% neutrality 85% quoted on this card Read 2026-08-20. THE SPINE, side A. 'Incident with GitHub.com', impact CRITICAL, created 2026-08-17T13:40:03.629Z, resolved 2026-08-17T21:15:46.623Z = 7h35m. Machine-readable, timestamped, the vendor's own record of its own outage. ALSO the rate finding: the endpoint returns 50 incidents and caps there, spanning 2026-06-17..2026-08-20 (~64 days) — 9 critical, 11 major, 29 minor, 1 none; by month 06:6, 07:26, 08:18. ⚠️ THIS ENDPOINT CANNOT SETTLE THE '257 OUTAGES IN A YEAR' FIGURE — its records begin 2026-06-17, four months AFTER that figure's window (May 2025-April 2026) closes. It was never the right instrument. The 257 IS verified, from LeadDev 2026-05-07 and IncidentHub's dataset (see those rows), which also carry the cross-forge index GitHub 257 / GitLab 132 / Bitbucket 27. Do not extrapolate this 50-in-64-days into an annual rate; cite the twelve-month index for that. QUOTED.
Cursor Status API — status.cursor.com/api/v2/incidents.json primary-vendor-log reliability 99% neutrality 85% quoted on this card Read 2026-08-20. THE SPINE, side B, and the card's central fact. Incident 'GitHub degradation affecting some Cursor services — Automations, Cloud Agents, Codebase', impact MAJOR, created 2026-08-17T14:34:00Z, resolved 2026-08-17T20:40:02.408Z = 6h6m. COMPONENTS: ['Automations','Review Agents','Cloud Agents','Origin'] — ORIGIN IS LISTED. Update body verbatim: 'We are investigating a service degradation affecting Automations, Cloud Agents, Review Agents and Codebase related to a GitHub degradation reported in GitHub's status page'. On the day the press called Origin a GitHub alternative, Cursor's own status page recorded Origin as degraded and named GitHub as the cause. 'Origin' is also a standing component on the summary endpoint. QUOTED.
Hacker News — news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331033 forum-thread reliability 70% neutrality 85% quoted on this card 'Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub', 2026-08-17. As read 2026-08-20: 639 points, 421 comments carrying text, walked from the Algolia item tree. THE PRESS-INVERSION FINDING. Counts are COMMENTS CONTAINING THE TERM, lowercased substring, from the walked tree: forgejo 60, gitlab 50, gitea 49, self-host 45, codeberg 43, tangled 21, cursor 10, origin 10, radicle 8, sourcehut 7, bitbucket 7. ⚠️ METHOD MATTERS: the 2026-08-19 cloud sweep used Algolia nbHits queries and got gitea 92 / forgejo 80 — materially different. Ours is the reproducible one and the card states the method. ⚠️ 10 is a CEILING for Cursor Origin, but NOT for the reason an earlier draft gave: there is no `git origin` collision — zero occurrences of `git origin`/`remote origin`/`push origin` across the 421 comments. Inspected individually, 8 of the 10 `cursor` hits name Cursor Origin and 2 mean the editor. One thread, one site, one day. QUOTED.
Qiita (JP) — qiita.com/Kinopee/items/747de22525344a796eed affiliated-first-hand reliability 75% neutrality 25% quoted on this card Kinopee, 2026-08-17. The most technical first-hand account in any language this sweep — ran a real refactoring PR through Origin. ⚠️⚠️ **THE AUTHOR IS A CURSOR AMBASSADOR.** His Qiita profile reads 'Cursor Ambassador Regional Leader(East Asia) / Devin Ambassador / Sponsored by CodeRabbit', and that string is embedded in the article's own author block (verified in the article HTML, 2026-08-20). Neutrality cut 0.85 -> 0.25 and EXCLUDED from n on re-check — this card's own rule is 'not selling or partnered with either side', and an ambassadorship conferred by Cursor is a stronger affiliation than the two we had already excluded. ⚠️ IN HIS FAVOUR, AND THE CARD SAYS SO: his findings run AGAINST Cursor's interest — bare Origin blocks nothing after `pr ready`, `request changes` is unimplemented, and the load claim is 「デモの域で、自分では検証できていません」. Still quoted, extensively; no longer counted. FINDINGS: Origin's unit is `change`; draft enforced by the model; `origin pr ready` -> Mergeable: yes with zero checks and 'CI passing: yes'; no Actions-equivalent; push 1.6s / `origin pr create` 3.1s. Read 2026-08-20.
personal blog (JP) — kt-tech.blog/blogs/cursor-origin-mirror-design first-hand reliability 75% neutrality 85% quoted on this card Koki, 2026-08-19. Synced their own repo and COUNTED what arrived. Title is the finding: 「Cursor Origin は GitHub を置き換えない — 『正』を残したまま、レビューの場所だけ移す設計」. Measured: 83 branches and 342 closed PRs arrive whole (bodies, comments, bot comments, bidirectional); Issues do NOT ('the tab does not exist'); GitHub Actions checks and secrets do NOT ('No checks'); branch protection does NOT ('No rulesets protect this repository yet'). Code Tour tested across three of their own PRs: long body -> full summary; two-line body -> 'No matching steps', nothing; third -> claimed 'Empty diff' then showed two files and guessed from the branch name in English. A one-button 'Detach from GitHub' exists. Corrects the press on opt-out: default-ON ≠ auto-mirrored — 「`Sync from GitHub` を自分で押すまで一覧は空でした」. Verdict: too early to move the source of truth, 「何よりデータの規約が出ていない」. ⚠️ States the outage as 6h42m, against GitHub's own 7h35m. QUOTED. Read 2026-08-20.
vendor docs — cursor.com/security primary-vendor reliability 95% neutrality 15% quoted on this card Read 2026-08-20, HTTP 200. ⚠️ REFUTES TWO WIDELY-REPEATED ABSENCE CLAIMS. TechTimes (2026-08-18) reports Cursor has published 'no subprocessor disclosures, no training-use policy'. Both false: 'Our list of subprocessors is published on our trust portal' (trust.cursor.com/subprocessors), each 'evaluated under our vendor risk management program and re-reviewed annually'; and Privacy Mode — 'When enabled, we will not train on your data', available to 'anyone (free or Pro)', with 'technical controls and contractual requirements with our model providers'. Also SOC 2 Type II on request, and 'at-least-annual penetration testing'. ⚠️ The page does NOT state a retention period, and cursor.com/legal/privacy was NOT read in full — so 'no data-retention terms' is NEITHER confirmed NOR refuted and stays off the card. QUOTED.
tech media (JP) — www.ai-souken.com/article/what-is-cursor-origin secondary reliability 55% neutrality 70% quoted on this card 2026-06-17. THE DATE CORRECTION NO ENGLISH SOURCE MADE: Origin was ANNOUNCED 2026-06-16 at Cursor's first developer event as 'A git forge for the agentic era', with a waitlist and an autumn target. The August beta is therefore the rollout of a June announcement, not a product conjured on outage day. Also: Graphite acquired 2025-12-19, reported >$290M. ⚠️ Its adoption figures (Stack Overflow 2026 Cursor 20% / Claude Code 51%; Sonar 2026 Cursor 31% / Copilot 75%) are third-party surveys NOT verified here — do not put them on the card face. QUOTED for the announcement date only. Read 2026-08-20.
Twitter/X — x.com/i/status/2090173987447861663 analysis reliability 60% neutrality 80% quoted on this card @airealitynoslop, 2026-08-19, 9 likes / 1,336 views as read 2026-08-20. THE SHARPEST COUNTER-CASE IN ENGLISH, and this card verified it independently at both status pages before citing it: 'every headline called it a GitHub alternative. Their own changelog is more careful than that... for code that already exists, Origin is a very good client sitting on top of GitHub rather than a replacement for it... It just means the thing being called a GitHub alternative had a six hour outage on launch day because GitHub had one.' ⚠️ 9 likes — a low-engagement post that was right. Not a first-hand usage report, so quoted and NOT counted in n. QUOTED.
Twitter/X — x.com/i/status/2089399057659596847 primary-vendor reliability 85% neutrality 15% quoted on this card @cursor_ai launch post, 2026-08-17 17:08:49 UTC. 25,438 likes / 25,868,317 views as read 2026-08-20 — the largest engagement in this corpus by three orders of magnitude, which is the point of the card's attention-vs-evidence asymmetry. Verbatim: 'Origin, our code hosting platform, is now live. It's fast, easy to use, and deeply integrated with Cursor. Get started by syncing your repos from GitHub.' ⚠️ VENDOR. QUOTED.
Twitter/X — x.com/i/status/2089409162270965858 social reliability 45% neutrality 20% quoted on this card @rauchg (Vercel CEO), 2026-08-17, 4,515 likes / 336,101 views as read 2026-08-20: 'You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel. And unlike GitHub, it's online 😁'. ⚠️ STAKE: Vercel is a day-one Origin integration partner, so this is a partner endorsing a launch he is part of. Quoted for the quip and the dependency it reveals; EXCLUDED from n.
B站 — www.bilibili.com/video/BV15tb667E4a secondary reliability 40% neutrality 75% quoted on this card 星小脉, published 2026-08-18 06:04, 32m44s. view 1,095 · reply 2 · like 1 · favorite 5 as read 2026-08-20. Uploader-written description only — subtitle track NOT checked, so no spoken content is cited. Describes creating a repo, using the Origin CLI, testing PR/comment/merge, and a 10,002-FILE STRESS TEST: 「界面只展示前 500 个文件，文件数量上升后性能变慢，文档和功能也存在不少缺口」, concluding Origin is 「仍处于早期产品阶段，暂不能作为成熟的 GitHub 替代方案」. ⚠️ ATTRIBUTION: its own description names 原视频 as a YouTube video (watch?v=NMsmZ-F_5Z0). THIS IS A TRANSLATION/REPOST, NOT AN INDEPENDENT TEST — cite as such, exclude from n.
小红书 — www.xiaohongshu.com/search_result/6a857a360000000005023db0 analysis reliability 45% neutrality 80% quoted on this card 神经网络, 2026-08-19, likes 4 / collects 1 / comments 0 as read 2026-08-20. The CN counter-case, well argued: 「Cursor 嘴上说要替代 GitHub，但它的双向同步实时绑在 GitHub 的 API 上…这是入场券，也是命门」 and 「现在的 Origin 只有前端，地基还在别人院子里」. Quotes an HN comment that running Git-scale infrastructure and building a hit editor are different engineering capabilities. Even-handed: 「我倾向认为方向是对的」. Advice: 「先别急着迁移，Early Beta 坑还多」. Analysis, not first-hand use — quoted, NOT counted. Durable key: note id 6a857a360000000005023db0 + author 神经网络 + 「这是入场券，也是命门」. QUOTED.
小红书 — www.xiaohongshu.com/search_result/6a83977f00000000330182f5 sentiment reliability 30% neutrality 75% read, not quoted IT 老徐说AI, 2026-08-18, 1,543 likes — the LARGEST CN engagement found on this subject. 「马斯克刚推出Origin，GitHub 今天直接崩了」. ⚠️ A press summary with a Musk framing, not a usage report. Recorded to show the shape of the CN corpus: 19 notes surfaced and the first-hand share is near zero. Read, not quoted. Read 2026-08-20.
tech media (JP) — www.itmedia.co.jp/aiplus/article/2608/18/2000000575/ secondary reliability 60% neutrality 75% read, not quoted 2026-08-17. Names the company — Anysphere. Confirms initial beta to all paid plans on the announcement day, organisations whose admin opted out excluded. Corroborates the bidirectional PR sync and that pushes continue to go to GitHub for synced repos. Read; used for corroboration. Read 2026-08-20.
personal blog (JP) — tomyunser.com/cursor-origin-codebase-github-setup/ conflicted-first-hand reliability 55% neutrality 10% quoted on this card 2026-08-18. Hands-on setup walkthrough. ⚠️⚠️ **CARRIES A CURSOR REFERRAL LINK, TWICE**: `https://cursor.com/referral?code=ZML9RG5Z2BRT`, under the CTA 「お得な招待リンクからCursorを始める」 and 「以下のリンクから月額プランを契約すると、初月は半額で利用できます」. Verified in the raw HTML 2026-08-20. ⚠️ IN FAIRNESS TO THE AUTHOR: the article carries a visible advertising label — `<div class="c-prNotation">…<span>広告</span></div>` — directly under the title, so the stake is DISCLOSED, not concealed. A referral code pays in account credit and gives the reader a discount; 'paid' overstates it. The exclusion stands (a disclosed stake is still a stake) but the card must carry the disclosure in the same breath. the same blog's homepage carries ZERO occurrences, so this is article-specific monetisation of Cursor subscriptions — and Origin is on all paid plans (per Cursor's own changelog), so the referral is for exactly the product under judgement. THIS CARD ORIGINALLY COUNTED HIM AS ITS ONLY POSITIVE VOICE, against its own stated rule ('not selling or partnered with either side') and while excluding @rauchg for a weaker conflict. EXCLUDED from n on re-check. Still cited for the branch-protection distinction, ⚠️-flagged. Read 2026-08-20.
tech press — techcrunch.com/2026/08/18/cursor-capitalizes-on-github-frustration-launches-rival-hosting-platform/ secondary reliability 55% neutrality 65% quoted on this card 2026-08-18. Source of the widely-repeated '257 outages over the past year' figure, attributed to a LeadDev analysis. ⚠️ SUPERSEDED: the 257 figure IS verifiable — see the leaddev.com and blog.incidenthub.cloud rows. An earlier draft of this card said five times that it could not be checked, and gave a wrong reason (the status API's records begin four months AFTER the 257 window closes, so it was never the instrument). This row is kept as the relay point, not as evidence of unverifiability. Also the source of the 'capitalizes on GitHub frustration' framing that §13 of facts.md corrects. Read 2026-08-20.
tech media (JP) — gigazine.net/news/20260819-cursor-github-rival-hosting-platform-origin/ secondary reliability 55% neutrality 75% read, not quoted 2026-08-18. JP coverage; links Cursor's own changelog (cursor.com/ja/changelog/origin-code-hosting) and TechCrunch. Corroborates the beta scope and the same-day GitHub outage. Read, lightly used. Read 2026-08-20.
vendor docs — docs.cursor.com/en/origin failed-fetch reliability 0% neutrality 0% read, not quoted Attempted 2026-08-20. Returns HTTP 200 but RENDERS THE GENERIC DOCS INDEX, not an Origin-specific page. Recorded as what was received. ⚠️ DO NOT WRITE 'Origin has no documentation' — that is an untested absence of exactly the shape that cost card #6 ten rounds. Cursor's changelog at cursor.com/changelog returns 200 and was NOT read in full this pass. Read 2026-08-20.
vendor docs — cursor.com/legal/privacy not-read reliability 0% neutrality 0% read, not quoted HTTP 200, 2026-08-20, NOT READ IN FULL. This is the page that would settle TechTimes' 'no data-retention terms' claim. Because it was not read, that claim is NEITHER repeated NOR contradicted anywhere on the card. Recorded so the next sweep starts here. Read 2026-08-20.
Cursor Status API — status.cursor.com/api/v2/summary.json machine-checkable reliability 99% neutrality 85% read, not quoted THE PAIRED HALF OF THE INCIDENT COUNT, run 2026-08-20 after a verifier caught the asymmetry. Same endpoint family and same method as the GitHub row: Cursor's incidents.json also returns 50 records and caps there, spanning 2026-06-22..2026-08-19 (~59 days) — 3 critical, 10 major, 37 minor. It fills the same 50-record cap in a SHORTER window than GitHub. And exactly ONE incident in the whole file names 'Origin' as a component, because Origin is three days old — which is the most decision-relevant fact on the reliability axis and was missing from the first draft. QUOTED.
Reddit — www.reddit.com/r/myclaw/comments/1vtduui/ secondary reliability 35% neutrality 70% read, not quoted r/myclaw, 11 comments, read via agent-reach 2026-08-20. A press summary carrying the '257 outages' figure and a MySpace-2007 analogy. Ledgered because the coverage footer names Reddit as read; NOT quoted, and no voice from it is counted — it is commentary, not usage.
Reddit — www.reddit.com/r/SPCXInvestors/comments/1vr8jyd/ secondary reliability 35% neutrality 70% read, not quoted r/SPCXInvestors, 9 comments, read via agent-reach 2026-08-20. Neowin-sourced summary; recites the June demo figures (22.6 commits/sec, 81K pushes/hr, 295K clones/hr). Ledgered for coverage honesty; NOT quoted.
tech press — leaddev.com/software-quality/whats-gone-wrong-at-github secondary reliability 75% neutrality 80% quoted on this card Charles Humble, 2026-05-07. ⚠️ THE SOURCE THIS CARD SAID IT COULD NOT VERIFY. Verbatim: 'between May 2025 and April 2026, incident monitoring service IncidentHub tracked 257 separate incidents on GitHub, of which 48 were classified as major outages… February's 37 incidents making it the worst month on record… Actions… 57 outages.' An earlier draft of this card said five times that the 257 figure could not be verified, and gave a reason that was itself wrong — the status API 'caps at 50 and reaches back two months', when the 257 window closes four months BEFORE that API's earliest record. The API was never the right instrument. Read 2026-08-20. QUOTED.
incident monitor — blog.incidenthub.cloud/github-reliability-outage-history-2025-2026 primary-source reliability 85% neutrality 80% quoted on this card IncidentHub, 2026-04-30 — THE PRIMARY DATASET behind the 257 figure, with a stated Methodology section. Verbatim: 'Total Incidents: 257 incidents tracked, out of which 48 were major outages'; 'Total Downtime for Major Outages: 112 hr 18 min'; 'Average MTTR: 6 hr 7 min'. ⭐ IT ALSO CARRIES THE PAIRED, CROSS-FORGE INDEX this card claimed did not exist — a section 'How GitHub Compares: GitLab & Bitbucket Reliability': GitHub 257 / GitLab 132 / Bitbucket 27 over the same window. ⚠️ NO TWELVE-MONTH EQUIVALENT EXISTS FOR CURSOR: Origin entered beta 2026-08-17, four months after this window closed, so the blank is a fact about the product's age and the card must say so rather than let it read as a good result. Read 2026-08-20. QUOTED.
vendor docs — cursor.com/changelog/origin-code-hosting secondary reliability 75% neutrality 15% read, not quoted Cursor's own Origin changelog. Fetched 2026-08-20, HTTP 200. Source of the verbatim quote this card uses twice — 'Pushes keep going to GitHub, which stays the source of truth for anything started there' — which had been on the face with NO ledger row. Also states the rollout is 'in early beta on all paid plans', which corrects this card's earlier 'Pro/Business-only'. ⚠️ VENDOR. QUOTED.

Straight answers

is cursor origin a github replacement?: Not for code you already have. Cursor’s own changelog says pushes for synced repositories keep going to GitHub, which stays the source of truth. A Japanese engineer who mirrored his own repo titled his write-up 「Cursor Origin は GitHub を置き換えない」 — Origin does not replace GitHub — and meant it approvingly. You can host natively on Origin, and Origin can host natively; that is a separate and later decision.
did cursor origin go down when github went down?: Cursor’s own status page says yes. On 2026-08-17 it logged “GitHub degradation affecting some Cursor services”, impact major, 14:34–20:40 UTC, and listed Origin among the affected components alongside Automations, Review Agents and Cloud Agents. The important limit: that log covers Cursor’s services and the GitHub sync. It does not tell you how a repo hosted natively on Origin behaved.
how long was the github outage on august 17 2026?: GitHub gives two numbers of its own: its incident timestamps span 7h 35m (13:40:03Z–21:15:46Z, impact critical), while its own resolution note reads “from 13:28–21:15 UTC (7h 47m)… At peak, web/API error rates were approximately 20%”. Cursor’s log gives 6 hours 6 minutes for its own exposure, 14:34 to 20:40. Both are primary and both are right: they measured different things.
what syncs from github to cursor origin?: Measured first-hand on one real repository: commits, branches and tags (83 branches) and pull requests (342 closed ones, whole — bodies, comments, even bot comments, syncing both ways). Issues do not sync — the tab does not exist. GitHub Actions checks and secrets do not. Branch protection does not; Origin has its own rules, but you rebuild them.
does cursor train on your code?: Cursor publishes a Privacy Mode which states: “When enabled, we will not train on your data”, available to anyone, free or Pro. Its security page also publishes a subprocessor list, “re-reviewed annually”, and a SOC 2 Type II report on request. Reports that Cursor publishes no training policy and no subprocessor list are wrong. On data retention this card makes no claim — cursor.com/legal/privacy answered HTTP 200 and was not opened this sweep.
how many outages does github actually have?: GitHub’s own status API returns 50 incidents between 2026-06-17 and 2026-08-20 — 9 critical, 11 major, 29 minor. Cursor’s, same endpoint and method, returns 50 over 2026-06-22 to 2026-08-19 — 3 critical, 10 major, 37 minor. Both are primary and both cap at 50. The widely-quoted “257 outages in a year” is verifiable and verified: LeadDev (2026-05-07), from IncidentHub’s tracked dataset — 257 incidents May 2025–April 2026, 48 major, 112 hr 18 min of major-outage downtime, and on the same index GitLab 132, Bitbucket 27. An earlier draft of this card said it could not be checked; the status API was simply the wrong instrument, since its records begin four months after that window ends.
what did developers actually recommend instead of github?: In Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub (2026-08-17, 639 points, 421 comments), the names that came up were Forgejo (60 comments), GitLab (50), Gitea (49) and Codeberg (43). Cursor was named in 10. The counts are comments containing each term; 8 of the 10 genuinely name Cursor Origin and two mean the editor, so 10 is a ceiling.
when was cursor origin announced?: 2026-06-16, at Cursor’s first developer event, as “a git forge for the agentic era”, with a waitlist and an autumn target. The initial beta shipped on 2026-08-17 — the day GitHub had a critical outage. The coincidence is in the beta date, not in the product’s existence; Cursor’s own staff said they had meant to ship earlier.

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