Developers lose focus 1,200 times a day — how MCP could change that

Software program builders spend most of their time not writing code; current trade analysis discovered that precise coding accounts for as little as 16% of developers’ working hours, with the remainder consumed by operational and supportive duties. As engineering groups are pressured to “do extra with much less” and CEOs are bragging about how a lot of their codebase is written by AI, a query stays: What’s finished to optimize the remaining 84% of the duties that engineers are engaged on?

Hold builders the place they’re the best

A significant offender 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 Evaluation examine discovered that the typical digital employee flips between purposes and web sites practically 1,200 times 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 generally worse, as practically 30% of interrupted tasks are never resumed. Context switching is definitely on the middle of DORA, one of the crucial fashionable efficiency software program growth frameworks.

In an period the place AI-driven corporations are attempting to empower their staff to do extra with much less, past “simply” giving them entry to massive language fashions (LLMs), some developments are rising. For instance, Jarrod Ruhland, principal engineer at Brex, hypothesizes that “builders ship their highest worth when centered inside their built-in growth atmosphere (IDE)”. With that in thoughts, he determined to seek out new methods to make this occur, and Anthropic’s new protocol may be one of many keys.

MCP: A protocol to carry context to IDEs

Coding assistants, comparable to LLM-powered IDEs like Cursor, Copilot and Windsurf, are on the middle of a developer renaissance. Their adoption velocity 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.

However these coding assistants had been solely restricted to codebase context, which may assist builders write code sooner, however couldn’t assist with context switching. A brand new protocol is addressing this difficulty: Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP). Launched in November 2024 by Anthropic, it’s an open commonplace developed to facilitate integration between AI programs, significantly LLM-based instruments, and exterior instruments and knowledge sources. The protocol is so fashionable that there was a 500% increase of recent MCP servers within the final 6 months, with an estimated 7 million downloads in June,

Some of the impactful purposes of MCP is its capacity to attach AI coding assistants on to the instruments builders depend on on daily basis, streamlining workflows and dramatically decreasing context switching.

Take function growth for example. Historically, it entails bouncing between a number of programs: Studying the ticket in a challenge tracker, a dialog with a teammate for clarification, looking documentation for API particulars and, lastly, opening the IDE to start out coding. Every step lives in a unique tab, requiring psychological shifts that sluggish builders down.

With MCP and trendy AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude, that complete 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, for example an incident response for SREs may appear to be:

Nothing new below the solar

We’ve seen this sample earlier than. Over the previous decade, Slack has remodeled office productiveness by changing into a hub for a whole bunch of apps, enabling staff to handle a variety of duties with out leaving the chat window. Slack’s platform lowered context switching in on a regular basis workflows. 

Riot Video games, for instance, related round 1,000 Slack apps, and engineers noticed a 27% reduction in time wanted to check and iterate code, a 22% sooner time to determine new bugs and a 24% enhance in function launch price; all had been attributed to streamlining workflows and decreasing the friction of tool-switching.

Now, an identical transformation is going on in software program growth, with AI assistants and their MCP integrations serving because the bridge to all these exterior instruments. In impact, the IDE may change into the brand new all-in-one command middle for engineers, very similar to Slack has been for normal information staff.

MCP is probably not enterprise prepared

MCP is a comparatively nascent commonplace, for instance, safety wisem MCP has no built-in authentication or permission mannequin, counting on exterior implementations which can 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 tough 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 safety assumptions that we’ve held for a very 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 a listing 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 device depend grows with some IDE integrations have imposed onerous limits (round 40 instruments in Cursor IDE, or ~20 instruments for the OpenAI agent) to stop the immediate from bloating past what the mannequin can deal with

Lastly, there is no such thing as a subtle means for instruments to be auto-discovered or contextually steered past itemizing all of them, so builders typically 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 may be unfit for enterprise utilization.

Much less swivel-chair, extra software program

The previous decade has taught us the worth of bringing work to the employee, from Slack channels that pipe in updates to “inbox zero” electronic mail methodologies and unified platform engineering dashboards. Now, with AI in our toolkit, now we have a possibility to empower builders to be extra productive. Suppose Slack grew to become the hub of enterprise communication.

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 maintaining builders of their circulation, we take away the fixed psychological gear-shifting that has plagued engineering productiveness.

For any group that relies on software program supply, take a tough take a look at how your builders spend their day; you may be stunned by what you discover.

Sylvain Kalache leads AI Labs at Rootly.