{"slug": "runtime-how-cursor-plans-to-take-on-github", "title": "Runtime: How Cursor plans to take on GitHub", "summary": "Cursor introduced Origins, a new code hosting service built on AWS S3 and write-ahead logging, designed to address the scalability issues of Git-based platforms like GitHub in the era of AI coding agents. The company claims Origins learns from GitHub's Spokes system and fixes known problems, as GitHub continues to experience outages. Cursor's Vicent Marti stated that agents have fundamentally changed software development and worsened existing infrastructure challenges.", "body_md": "[Runtime](/tag/runtime/)\n\n*Welcome to Runtime! Today on Product Saturday: Cursor unveils a version control system for software development right as GitHub continues to struggle to stay online, Slack wants to be an IDE for group projects (kinda, and more.*\n\n*Please forward this email to a friend or colleague! If it was forwarded to you, *__sign up here__* to get Runtime for free every week, or*__ level up here__*.*\n\n### Ship it\n\n**Origins**: If AI really is an enterprise platform shift of the same magnitude as cloud computing, it shouldn't be surprising that tools designed for an earlier era aren't necessarily the right tools for the new era. Just as [ GitHub's scaling issues](https://www.thestack.technology/githubs-latest-outage-blamed-on-policy-error/) continued to leave software developers high and dry this week, Cursor introduced a new code hosting service called Origins that it claims was designed with full knowledge of the Git services that came before it and the ways in which they are breaking with the advent of AI coding agents.\n\n\"Origin is Cursor's git forge for storing and sharing code. Use it to host repositories, sync projects from GitHub, and browse your team's Origin repos in the browser,\" the company said in documentation [ accompanying the product launch](https://cursor.com/docs/origin?ref=thestack.technology). Git is the second-most famous open-source project Linus Torvalds ever developed, and GitHub has been the most widely used code hosting platform built around that project basically since it launched in 2008.\n\nBut 2008 was a long time ago, and anyone developing software in 2026 knows that GitHub is straining under the weight of the explosion in AI-driven software created by agents. In [ a long but very interesting blog post](https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale?ref=thestack.technology) that accompanied the launch announcement, Cursor's Vicent Marti laid out how early GitHub engineers made architectural decisions — most of which made sense at the time — that are coming back to bite the company under a traffic load that is exposing weak points, and a lot of those issues can't be solved by simply throwing compute at the problem.\n\n\"Continuity is the Git storage system we've developed at Cursor, with a very clear approach: learning from everything that [ Spokes](https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/building-resilience-in-spokes/?ref=thestack.technology) did well, and fixing the things that, after many years, we now know are problems,\" Marti wrote. \"Agents have fundamentally changed the way we work with software, and in many ways they've made this situation worse,\" he wrote, and Origins — based around AWS's S3 and the concept of\n\n[— is an attempt to reinvent the software version control system for the agentic AI era.](https://www.architecture-weekly.com/p/the-write-ahead-log-a-foundation?ref=thestack.technology)\n\n__write-ahead logging__### Delivery, continued\n\n**Many agents are coding**: If hearing the term \"Agentforce\" has you [ staring off into the distance like Obi-Wan Kenobi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3LE15AyT5g&ref=thestack.technology), you're\n\n[. But after a very long walk through the product desert Salesforce is turning out some interesting initiatives in 2026, starting with its](https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/08/21/salesforce-partners-not-seeing-meaningful-revenue-from-agentforce-ai-platform-report-says/5291167?ref=thestack.technology)\n\n__not alone__[and the rollout this week of a new version of Slack that includes Slack Code, which allows software developers and AI agents to collaborate on coding projects.](https://www.runtime.news/enterprise-software-brings-out-the-guillotine/?ref=thestack.technology)\n\n__headless software push earlier this year__\"Slack Code gives your team a dedicated place to work with an agent on a specific coding session or project, together, right in Slack,\" the company [ said in a blog post](https://www.salesforce.com/introducing-slack-code/?ref=thestack.technology). Anyone with access to the tool — not just developers — can @-mention coding agents like Claude Code or Codex within Slack and Slack Code will create a new channel for that project that team members can see and comment on as the work unfolds.\n\n**Snow plow**: AI model routing was a big topic this week after [ Stripe finally confirmed that it was buying OpenRouter](https://www.thestack.technology/stripe-acquires-openrouter-setting-up-a-battle-for-ai-routing-business/) for a reported $7.5 billion, and there are a lot of enterprise software companies vying to insert themselves between end users and the model providers. Snowflake jumped into that space this week with the release of some new features in its Cortex AI Gateway that help customers direct their applications toward different models depending on the nature of the request.\n\n\"With the addition of dynamic model routing, Cortex AI Gateway can automatically select the specific model with the optimal balance of quality and cost for the task at hand,\" Snowflake [ said in a press release](https://www.snowflake.com/en/news/press-releases/snowflake-unlocks-better-ai-economics-dynamic-model-routing/?ref=thestack.technology). Snowflake customers using its CoCo (sigh) and CoWork AI products will also be able to more easily switch between models, a feature that is quickly becoming table stakes for enterprise AI software.\n\n**Chip in**: Given the constrained electrical grid and exploding local opposition to new data-center construction across the US, AI companies and hyperscalers are looking at several years during which they're going to have to get more of their existing assets. Cerebras introduced the fourth generation of its AI chip this week that promises to improve both the performance and efficiency of enterprise AI applications.\n\n\"CS-4 is designed around a simple idea: the next leap in AI infrastructure cannot come from improving one component in isolation. Compute, power, cooling, and I/O have to move forward together,\" Cerebras [ said in a blog post](https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/introducing-cerebras-cs-4?ref=thestack.technology). The new chip promises a 30x improvement in performance \"while delivering up to 10 times more throughput per watt than CS-3,\" the company said.\n\n### Quote of the week\n\n\"If you're using unstructured text, the problem has been solved. There are enough LLMs out there. When you talk about tabular data, [that] problem has not been solved.\" — *Scheme Labs CEO Guiliano Pezzoli, *__explaining to The Stack__* how tabular foundation models are gaining traction in enterprise circles due to their ability to unlock insights from structured data.*\n\n### We're also reading:\n\n**\"The August 17 outage, and the work ahead,\" a thoughtful and contrite **[blog post from GitHub CTO Vlad Federov](https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead/?ref=thestack.technology) putting Monday's outage into more context and promising to do better.\n\n**\"GitHub, autoscaling, and the component substitution fallacy,\" a **__post from Airbnb engineer Lorin Hochstein__** on a particular segment of the cascading GitHub outage**, and lessons that other site-reliability engineers can take from this incident.\n\n*Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/runtime-how-cursor-plans-to-take-on-github", "canonical_source": "https://www.thestack.technology/runtime-how-cursor-plans-to-take-on-github/", "published_at": "2026-08-22 15:00:46+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-22 15:13:15.311889+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-agents", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Cursor", "Origins", "GitHub", "Vicent Marti", "AWS S3", "Slack", "Salesforce"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/runtime-how-cursor-plans-to-take-on-github", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/runtime-how-cursor-plans-to-take-on-github.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/runtime-how-cursor-plans-to-take-on-github.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/runtime-how-cursor-plans-to-take-on-github.jsonld"}}