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  • The key part: they decided to use the unchanged git codebase as their building block. Likely assuming that the people who wrote the Linux kernel probably knew what they were doing. That explains some features that look bizarre from the generic distributed-database perspective. I think the author has had this argument many times, because he reiterates it several times in the post. The rest follows from it.
    by gritzko
  • It wasn't that long ago that S3 didn't have read-after-write consistency. Crazy to see the explosion in cool stuff built on top after that change. This is a really well written article and definitely changes my perception about Cursor's capability to host a reliable Github replacement. But I could never bring myself to use it because of whose leadership they're under now. It's such a shame.
    by bilalq
  • I have to say, when I first heard about Origin, I was skeptical. But now I do believe that the team behind it is capable of pulling it off and shipping something truly incredible.

    This is one of the best technical articles I’ve read. And I came away a lot more knowledgable about a technology I have used daily for over a decade and consider myself adept at. Kudos to the author.

    by iamandoni
  • https://cursor.com/en-US/blog/git-at-any-scale to avoid automatic translations (couldn't find a button to switch)
    by wibr
  • There’s a trend of doing impressive things by pushing many of the hard problems into S3 and assuming S3 “just works”, then not bothering to explain how S3 works. I guess we do the same thing all the time with other miraculous solutions to hard problems, like assuming that superscalar out-of-order processors “just work”, but in cases like this it makes for an unsatisfying explanation. Especially because S3 is a proprietary product, not an algorithm.
    by wrs
  • There's nothing Cursor can do that GitHub/Microsoft can't in 2026... And vice versa... after several years of Cursor vibecoding a GitHub clone while catching up with GitHub's new features. Git's performance it's not the issue; it's GitHub Actions, PRs, etc. The moment Cursors steals paid GitHub customers and gets the same workloads, they will start having similar issues! Stealing engineers who couldn't fix this at GitHub won't make much of a difference. GitHub is not just source control; everybody can set up Gitolite and have an amazingly configurable and secure Git setup. I did this 10 years ago, and CODEOWNERS, protected branches, and tags can't do 1% of what I had done before. Cursor is going all over the place as it can't compete with their model. So, this is a defeat, a pivot, not something glorious!
    by nikolay
  • > What about consensus? Elections? Which server is the primary for a given repository? It also doesn't matter! There's no state and no consensus here. Any server can be the primary. All updates to the write-ahead log are synchronized with an atomic compare-and-swap (CAS) operation on S3, so it's always safe for any instance of a repository to receive a push.

    Again reminded of what an amaizing piece of engineering S3 is (99.999999999% - 11 nines of durability) [1]

    1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu...

    by biwills
  • It’s hard to overstate the reputation of the author of this post. Everything good about GitHub’s internal systems seemed to have his name all over it (I realize that today this statement hits different than a few years ago). Our times at GH didn’t overlap much but hearing the fact that he’s working at cursor increases my estimation of their engineering org by leaps and bounds.
    by brasic

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