During the last decade, GitHub has been the undisputed leader in its category, still hosting most open-source projects. Quite striking that two competitors just launched almost at once: Origin, from Cursor, and Buzz, from Block.
Many noted Origin's launch landing the exact day GitHub suffered a major outage. In reality, this had been building for a while—Mitchell Hashimoto, one of GitHub's very first users, had already announced months earlier he was leaving after 18 years, citing repeated reliability issues.
For my part, I took the time to read back into the company's origins. Its founding, in 2008, is inseparable from a specific moment in the web—the rise of the social web—and from the democratization of software engineering that came with it.
Three years earlier, in April 2005, the Linux kernel lost free access to BitKeeper, its version-control tool: a developer had reverse-engineered its protocol, and the vendor revoked the license. In response, Linus Torvalds wrote Git in about two weeks—distributed, fast, cheap to branch, built for a project too large for existing tools. GitHub, three years later, solved a different problem: not just the tool, but the community around it—forking, pull requests, a shared place to build in public. Arguably what democratized software engineering, more than Git itself. What made GitHub win—building for humans—is exactly what's straining it now.
Over time, GitHub grew into something bigger: almost the operating system of software delivery—source control, review, CI/CD, security. Microsoft has made it one of the spearheads of its AI strategy, Copilot now driving much of its revenue growth. But it doesn't change one fact: GitHub (like Microsoft) was designed before the agent era, whatever the marketing narrative says. Its core abstraction, the PR, was designed for a human reviewer—discussions, comments, markdown. Agents need something else: machine-readable state, execution traces, confidence thresholds.
By Origin's own claim, it builds on that gap directly: an agent's diffs, checks, and merges are native actions inside the editor, not a comment thread to parse. Buzz goes further, built on Nostr, a decentralized protocol where every action is a signed, portable event—not a row in a database. An agent opening a repo, running a workflow, or joining a voice huddle—a term borrowed from Slack—produces the same kind of event a human's message does.
Both Origin and Buzz are native to AI agents by construction. GitHub, in contrast, is retrofitting. A bit like adding a copilot to a plane, versus redesigning the plane as a drone—or a swarm of drones.
Ultimately, a bigger question: whether design assumptions built for the SaaS era—Microsoft, Salesforce, Atlassian alike—still hold now that the digital workplace is increasingly shared with AI agents.
