The Download: MCP funeral, Perplexity computer, and Doom on a badge

This week, MCP is dead and Fast MCP is hosting the funeral. Perplexity has announced something called a personal computer. The GitHub Universe badge can run Doom. And finally, an answer to all of your label hacks on GitHub. Issue fields are rolling out in public preview. All that and more on today's episode of the download. [music] Welcome to the download the show where we keep you up to date on all the latest and greatest developer news and open source projects. Hi, I'm GPS, a dev advocate here at GitHub. And let's get right into it. First up, MCP is dead. It's not really dead, but the tech section of social media this week really tried to make that a thing. And it started with the very popular hot take that why would you use MCP if you could just use a bunch of shell commands. And I will say up to a certain scale I think that could be a viable solution. However, don't take my opinion for it. Let's take Gergy Oros's opinion who writes the awesome newsletter called Pragmatic Engineer. Highly recommend you check it out. He just did this piece on Uber and how Uber uses a bunch of AI agents and workflows with all of the services that they've got going on. And his opinion was that once you hit midsize, large size, enterprise size scale, the question is never going to be should we use MCP or should we use CLIs. The question will be how can we connect our AI agents to our internal services in ways that are secure, consistent in that scale. And the truth is that MCP was made to tick all of those boxes. But because of course as developers we can only handle our emotions through memes, the Fast MCP team is hosting a funeral for MCP. Fast MCP is the most popular library to build MCP servers in Python and the creators are hosting the funeral on April 1st of course in New York City ahead of the MCP summit. So if you are looking for something to do, you're in the area April 1st, throw on an all black outfit and go ahead and check out the funeral and also check out the MCP summit. There are going to be a bunch of great talks. So you can network with a lot of people in that space. And if you are team MCP or team CLI, whatever it is, drop a comment. Let us know what you're thinking here. Moving on. Now, let's say you want to not only connect your agents to your internal services. What if you want them to just be on all the time with access to everything? Well, Perplexity is throwing their hat into the ring on this Agents in a box type situation that's been going on. You know, we've seen Open Claw, we've seen Zo Computer. There's a couple of solutions in this space now, but they've announced something called personal computer, which is a Mac Mini that has all of your files, everything you would expect to be on a Mac Mini, and it's connected to Perplexity's secure servers, which is what gives it access to those AI agents. Their vision is that your work, your session with AI shouldn't just live within a browser and as soon as you close it, it's gone. It should just be on all the time and everything that you have on your computer. They do have a wait list now and I will put that link in the description. They are also onboarding their first cohort, so I'm sure we'll start to see reviews and things like that. But if this something you're interested in, check it out. and you know also check out the other options that are out there. Moving on to our nonAI topic of the week. I'm going to try to make that a thing. [laughter] We have now answered the question that is so important to many developers and that we must keep working on. [music] Can it run Doom? You know, we're trying to figure out if anything out there that has some way to work with electricity can run Doom. And a massive shout out to this week's contribution to that question. Charlie Burke has found a way to run Doom on the GitHub Universe badge. Check out this video that was posted on the official GitHub account on Twitter. It shows Doom running on the badge. And there is a discussion post by Charlie with the instructions, a little bit more information on the port. And the cool thing that I really like about this is that the badge itself has a button that says hold sleep to reset. and the port respects that which makes it feel like quite thoughtful and well put together versus you know a hack. But thank you so much Charlie whose GitHub username is Daft Freak which I'm really hoping is a play on Da Punk. But go and check out the discussion that he posted and get all the information. You have a badge. Go and play with this. If you don't have a badge, why don't you come to GitHub Universe this year? Come hang out with a bunch of cool people. Watch a bunch of cool talks. Get yourself a badge. That way you can run Doom on it. All right, and to end this episode, we're going to talk about solving all of your label hacks. So, are you someone who has something like, I don't know, P 0 priority, severity/h high uh team/frontend, you know, the possibilities here are endless, right? You know, the pain points that you get with a setup like that. Validation, consistency, reporting, a whole bunch of things, right? because you're essentially using these labels as like a pseudo database, right? Well, issue fields are officially being rolled out in public preview which are going to solve these problems for you. You're going to get some out of the box. I think you get like priority, start date, end date, things like that. And there are a bunch of different issue field types you can use. Single select dates of course and more. Admins are going to be able to configure that. There's going to be, you know, APIs and automation support that you can leverage. And if you already kne deep into labelbased workflows, there's going to be an official migration tool that's going to help you go from those to these new issue fields. So, no worries there. You're going to be able to report on them, search them, and a whole bunch of other things. So, very happy that this is becoming a thing. More information link in the description. And that is it for this episode. Let me know in the comments. Are you team MCP? Are you team CLI? Are you team I just want to work with whatever is best for my situation. And don't forget to like and subscribe. While you're there, do me a favor. Send this video to a developer friend who is still using labels as [music] a database. I'll see you in the next episode.