Cursor, GitLab and Zed agree GitHub is breaking. They disagree on how to rebuild it.

GitHub is struggling under the load of AI-generated code, processing 1.4 billion commits per month and logging hundreds of incidents over the past year. Three companies are racing to rebuild code hosting for the agentic era with fundamentally different approaches: Cursor unveiled Origin, a Git-compatible platform designed for agent workloads with MCP support and built-in CI failure resolution; GitLab announced Project Switch (Next Generation SCM), which keeps Git protocol but redesigns the backend to allow server-side repository queries — delivering up to 50x faster agent task execution with 3x fewer tokens; and Zed introduced DeltaDB, the most radical departure, replacing Git's commit model entirely with a continuous stream of fine-grained deltas tied to agent conversations. Former GitHub director Brian Douglas argues that tokens — not commits or lines of code — are the right metric for the agentic era, and that owning the underlying model (as Cursor does with Composer) is what makes owning the broader developer stack viable.