Software program builders spend most of their time not writing code; latest business analysis discovered that precise coding accounts for as little as 16% of builders’ working hours, with the remaining consumed by operational and supportive duties. As engineering groups are pressured to “do more with less” and CEOs are bragging about how a lot of their codebase is written by AI, a query stays: What’s carried out to optimize the remaining 84% of the duties that engineers are engaged on?
Maintain builders the place they’re the best
A serious perpetrator to developer productiveness is context switching: The fixed hopping between the ever-growing array of instruments and platforms wanted to construct and ship software program. A Harvard Enterprise Overview research discovered that the typical digital employee flips between functions and web sites almost 1,200 instances per day. And each interruption issues. The College of California discovered that it takes about 23 minutes to regain focus after a single interruption totally, and typically worse, as almost 30% of interrupted duties are by no means resumed. Context switching is definitely on the heart of DORA, probably the most widespread efficiency software program improvement frameworks.
In an period the place AI-driven corporations are attempting to empower their staff to do extra with much less, past “just” giving them entry to massive language fashions (LLMs), some tendencies are rising. For instance, Jarrod Ruhland, principal engineer at Brex, hypothesizes that “developers deliver their highest value when focused within their integrated development environment (IDE)”. With that in thoughts, he determined to seek out new methods to make this occur, and Anthropic’s new protocol could be one of many keys.
MCP: A protocol to carry context to IDEs
Coding assistants, reminiscent of LLM-powered IDEs like Cursor, Copilot and Windsurf, are on the heart of a developer renaissance. Their adoption pace is unseen. Cursor grew to become the fastest-growing SaaS in historical past, reaching $100 million ARR inside 12 months of launch, and 70% of Fortune 500 corporations use Microsoft Copilot.
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However these coding assistants had been solely restricted to codebase context, which might assist builders write code quicker, however couldn’t assist with context switching. A brand new protocol is addressing this problem: Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP). Launched in November 2024 by Anthropic, it’s an open customary developed to facilitate integration between AI methods, significantly LLM-based instruments, and exterior instruments and information sources. The protocol is so widespread that there was a 500% improve of recent MCP servers within the final 6 months, with an estimated 7 million downloads in June,
One of the crucial impactful functions of MCP is its skill to attach AI coding assistants on to the instruments builders depend on day-after-day, streamlining workflows and dramatically decreasing context switching.
Take function improvement for example. Historically, it entails bouncing between a number of methods: Studying the ticket in a undertaking tracker, a dialog with a teammate for clarification, looking documentation for API particulars and, lastly, opening the IDE to begin coding. Every step lives in a distinct tab, requiring psychological shifts that sluggish builders down.
With MCP and fashionable AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude, that whole course of can occur contained in the editor.
For instance, implementing a function all inside a coding assistant turns into:
The identical precept can apply to many different engineers workflow, as an illustration an incident response for SREs might appear like:
Nothing new underneath the solar
We’ve seen this sample earlier than. Over the previous decade, Slack has reworked office productiveness by turning into a hub for lots of of apps, enabling staff to handle a variety of duties with out leaving the chat window. Slack’s platform decreased context switching in on a regular basis workflows.
Riot Video games, for instance, related round 1,000 Slack apps, and engineers noticed a 27% discount in time wanted to check and iterate code, a 22% quicker time to establish new bugs and a 24% improve in function launch price; all had been attributed to streamlining workflows and decreasing the friction of tool-switching.
Now, the same transformation is going on in software program improvement, with AI assistants and their MCP integrations serving because the bridge to all these exterior instruments. In impact, the IDE might change into the brand new all-in-one command heart for engineers, very similar to Slack has been for basic data employees.
MCP will not be enterprise prepared
MCP is a comparatively nascent customary, for instance, safety wisem MCP has no built-in authentication or permission mannequin, counting on exterior implementations which might be nonetheless evolving There’s additionally ambiguity round identification and auditing — the protocol doesn’t clearly distinguish whether or not an motion was triggered by a consumer or the AI itself, making accountability and entry management troublesome with out extra customized options. Lori MacVittie, distinguished engineer and chief evangelist in F5 Networks’ Workplace of the CTO, says that MCP is “breaking core security assumptions that we’ve held for a long time.”
One other sensible limitation arises when too many MCP instruments or servers are used concurrently, for instance, inside a coding assistant. Every MCP server advertises an inventory of instruments, with descriptions and parameters, that the AI mannequin wants to contemplate. Flooding the mannequin with dozens of obtainable instruments can overwhelm its context window. Efficiency degrades noticeably because the instrument depend grows with some IDE integrations have imposed onerous limits (round 40 instruments in Cursor IDE, or ~20 instruments for the OpenAI agent) to forestall the immediate from bloating past what the mannequin can deal with
Lastly, there isn’t a refined manner for instruments to be auto-discovered or contextually recommended past itemizing all of them, so builders usually must toggle them manually or curate which instruments are lively to maintain issues working easily. Referring to that instance of Riot Video games putting in 1,000 Slack apps, we will see the way it could be unfit for enterprise utilization.
Much less swivel-chair, extra software program
In that case, coding assistants are well-positioned to change into the hub of software program creation, not simply the place code is written, however the place all of the context and collaborators coalesce. By protecting builders of their movement, we take away the fixed psychological gear-shifting that has plagued engineering productiveness.
For any group that depends upon software program supply, take a tough have a look at how your builders spend their day; you could be stunned by what you discover.
Sylvain Kalache leads AI Labs at Rootly.
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