How to use Cursor Origin
Corbin Brown
3 min read
Cursor Origin is Cursor's own code host: a place to store your project's history, share it with a team, and review changes, the job GitHub has done for most people until now. It's in early beta and available on Cursor's paid plans (Pro, Teams, and Enterprise), not the free plan. The pitch is that code written by agents moves faster than tools built for humans were designed for, so the host should be built around agents too: repos created straight from a Cursor agent, cloud agents and automations connected in a click.
What you can do in the beta
- Create a repository, including directly from a Cursor agent. Standard git works underneath: clone, push, and pull exactly as you would with GitHub.
- Mirror a GitHub repository into Origin. GitHub stays the source of truth and Origin holds a synced copy, so you can try it without moving anything.
- Open, review, and merge pull requests (proposed changes, bundled for review), and browse or search your code in the browser at cursor.com/codebase.
- Connect cloud agents and automations to a repo, plus third-party apps like Vercel from repository settings. There's also an Origin CLI for terminal workflows.
Getting started, in order
- 1Claim a codebase name. This is the namespace your repos live under, the “owner” part of a repo's web address. During the beta you cannot change it once claimed, so pick it as carefully as a domain name. Any team member can do this from cursor.com/codebase.
- 2Start with a mirror, not a move. Sync an existing GitHub repo into Origin and use it for a week. Nothing about your current setup breaks, and you learn the interface on a project you know.
- 3Create your next project natively. Ask your Cursor agent to create the repo on Origin; from then on, commits, pull requests, and cloud agents all live in one place.
- 4Check the privacy setting. Origin follows the Privacy Mode of whoever owns the namespace (the team or the individual). Teams on the legacy privacy mode have to switch before Origin turns on.
Origin or GitHub?
For now, both. GitHub has fifteen years of integrations and every deploy platform speaks it natively. Origin's advantage is being inside the same tool that writes the code and runs your cloud agents, which removes a lot of connecting. The mirror feature exists precisely so you don't have to choose today. Try it on a side project, keep your production repo where it is, and move when Origin has earned it.
FAQ
Do I lose my GitHub history if I move?
No. Git history travels with the repository: a mirror or a push to Origin carries every commit. What doesn't travel automatically are GitHub-specific things like issues and Actions workflows, so audit those before a full move.
Can free-plan users see an Origin repo?
Origin code storage is for paid plans, and access opens in stages, so even paid users may not see it immediately. If a collaborator is on the free plan, keep a GitHub mirror as the shared surface for now.