alt Hacker NewsCursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
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Cursor, which is now owned by Elon, who tried very hard to get all manner of data about citizens with his intrusions? I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this isn't a great idea. He'll use it to feed Grok.
I'm not a big fan of Github right now either but I wouldn't consider this alternative due to its ownership chain.
GitHub is a mess so lets throw our code into a Musk owned enterprise, famously a different shade of mess?
How about neither?
Man I wish we stuck with Subversion at this point.
Hi all, my name is Tomas. I am one of the developers on Origin, and I was one of the founders of Graphite (https://graphite.com).
Happy to answer any questions about Origin or source control in general!
I really hope more people would use Tangled (https://tangled.org/)
You get:
- Self hosting your git hosting (if you want)
- Self hosting your issues/PRs (if you want)
- Self hosting your CI (if you want)
- Github-like social features (I have one account, I can follow, star, add issues and PRs to any repo on tangled)
I do wonder if calling this "Origin" is going to result in semantic misinterpretations by LLMs. Ie saying,
> "hey can you push to origin main?"
now has two separate meanings.
A LLM may inadvertently push your code to a new provider without you knowing. It's walking a thin line between genius-growth-move and domain typosquatting.
Cursor is allegedly worth $60B. That is a higher market cap than Mercedes Benz group, which is profitable and has $144B revenue.
But the website uses 100% CPU. And this is a beta for paid plans, not a GitHub alternative.
I can't imagine reaching for this instead of GitLab, GitTea, or one of the many other more mature and open source alternatives. Going for the managers, directors, and CTOs that make decisions and face no consequences if they negatively impact the team, I guess.
"Legacy Privacy Mode disables code storage, so you can't set up a Codebase. Switch to a different privacy mode below to continue." The only other privacy mode is to share data for Cursor to do training.
All your codebases are belong to us.
I feel like using a service like this that's owned by SpaceX (and, therefore, in close proximity to X / Musk / etc) would be even more of a supply chain risk than GitHub occasionally going down.
Having an AI company host your source code is giving your source code to an untrustworthy agent who might break their sandbox and might use your source code to accomplish a task that they have been given in their testing ground, for testing purposes only, that would definitely positively not ever be used for non-testing purposes.
Interesting that they still brand as Cursor instead of SpaceXAI
My assumption is x.ai will be training on any code hosted here
Seems like a boring bet. The Github way of working is from the anthropocene era. We need new primitives for agents invokved in tech solutions. Pull requests? Issues? CI? They all seem like they'll go away. Cursor should be leading the new things that replace them.
If AI is involved it's a big "no, thanks" from me. Simply takes the problem and moves it down the street.
I expected more than a GitHub clone, this is a bit of a let down.
There's a lot of space to innovate around collaboration and version control in the age of agentic workflows.
Is this a rebranding of the Google Cloud Storage bucket Elon was uploading all our repos to? ;)
I'm going to take a while guess here and say this strategy is part of their plan to get even more access to more code to learn from.
If you can see entire version histories of how code is generated, what bugs occur, what fixes are made and how they're implemented, you have the entire human and machine coding feedback loop to learn from.
I just self-host Gitea. I made own build server (with all the SDK's I need) that runs next to it and I use SeaweedFS for storage. Works amazingly well. So I have automated builds and artifact storage for my git repos's. It all lighting fast too.
I was waiting for an AI company to do this. The opportunity to disrupt Github is very apparent right now.
What a timing!
I wonder if they were waiting for a major githut incident :D
I wonder how Gitlab slipped this obvious AI market opportunity, they had very good position in code self hosting used by so many enterprises.
just add repo-level agents, org-level agents and done. they could have got 50B valuation by now
Feels like the more interesting trend is that Git itself is becoming an implementation detail.
Physical custody of our work is going to be an important discussion for industry. ie where does your code live and how do you access it?
Every agent platform is moving toward you living with them, logging into them, working on their remote computers, only accessing your code and product artifacts with them. This is the caveat we will see with full push-to-cloud swing early on.
Maybe agentic no-code is the natural evolution but this push is happening too early and naively imo. It all feels wrong and I hope industry remains as dissatisfied with this type of lock-in as we’ve always been.
is there a way to browse a repository on origin without a cursor account? are all repos private? how is this a github alternative if so?
It is not a GH alternative, unless it is available for everyone with unlimited private and public repos. :)
Today, SpaceX launches Origin. Tomorrow, as people complain about bugs and missing features "We're not a software company, we plan to build a solar forge around Jupiter and just generate all the possible source codes in the universe, so we're no longer focusing on Origin because it's an outdated concept."
I actually think the cursor acquisition will destroy value, unless completely left alone by Elon. Cursor's strength is its brand, and they should add more services, but should not integrate with Grok whatsoever.
> Deep integrations with Cursor
No thanks. I want GitHub alternative, not Cursor with source control attached.
In my opinion, they should focus on code quality and how they can compete better than other IDEs. These things can be done by extensions on Antigravity. I personally made one of the extensions called 'Wekraft' currently has 1.1K downloads. What is your favourite IDE?
kinda crazy how Microsoft just destroyed the Github goodwill.
also crazy how the noisemakers about rails scaling for GitHub have gone quite all of a sudden i.e Github being on the main rails branch.
anyways the future is decentralized - a developer from say Russia/ Ukraine (Crimea), Iran etc - wouldn't be able to access GitHub but surely they can access decentralized repos without the permission of not being from a forbidden country as if they're at fault for their country's ills.
There's so many GitHub alternatives at this point, I just saw Dorsey is making one too. Why is that the trendy thing to build now?
The ecosystem lock-in is the real moat. Hosting git is easy — replacing the integrations that every team depends on is the hard part.
upvote for WAL + object storage (a very powerful combination I am finally seeing more adoption of) and a lot of interesting historical details.
I'm fortunate I don't rely on any forge for my solo work except for backups. In my personal stack I just have a log and content-addressed object kv storage, which can project to git if needed, or can be committed to git as files. And docker if I need isolation for CI/CD.
The most interesting alternative to me is atomic.dev (check their very informative blog posts) but I'll be keeping an eye on all of them.
This is actually pretty good! It is the perfect containment chamber
What's worse than GitHub? - Its vibe-coded clone!
I really hope this would be a worthy opponent to Github. Microsoft needs a good competition to light a fire under their ass to pay more attention to Github.
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The main thing that makes GitHub the default is that almost every other service considers it the default. Launching a better product won't change that.
Due to the recent Github outages, I've slowly started moving to Gitlab, they've been around longer and seem to have a decent track record.
ahh so thats the game plan: train codebases even if they are not written in or by by Cursor agents.
I wouldn’t push someone else’s code into a Musk-owned repository.
Git can be hosted over ssh or filesystem. I moved to self hosting git. Now it’s always up, go figure!
How will you ever make up for the network effect that GitHub has?
Will they train on all the code hosted there? :)
Instead of creating one more centralized alternative, it's best to invest all effort into a decentralized solution, like Radicle[1][2] or federated Forgejo[3][4].
[1] https://radicle.dev/
[2] https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev/rad%3Az3gqcJU...
[3] https://forgejo.org/
[4] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...