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Software developers spend most of their time not writing code; recent industry research found that actual coding accounts for as little as 16% of developers’ working hours, with the rest consumed by operational and supportive tasks. As engineering teams are pressured to “do more with less” and CEOs are bragging about how much of their codebase is written by AI, a question remains: What’s done to optimize the remaining 84% of the tasks that engineers are working on?
Keep developers where they are the most productive
A major culprit to developer productivity is context switching: The constant hopping between the ever-growing array of tools and platforms needed to build and ship software. A Harvard Business Review study found that the average digital worker flips between applications and websites nearly 1,200 times per day. And every interruption matters. The University of California found that it takes about 23 minutes to regain focus after a single interruption fully, and sometimes worse, as nearly 30% of interrupted tasks are never resumed. Context switching is actually at the center of DORA, one of the most popular performance software development frameworks.
In an era where AI-driven companies are trying to empower their employees to do more with less, beyond “just” giving them access to large language models (LLMs), some trends are emerging. For example, Jarrod Ruhland, principal engineer at Brex, hypothesizes that “developers deliver their highest value when focused within their integrated development environment (IDE)”. With that in mind, he decided to find new ways to make this happen, and Anthropic’s new protocol might be one of the keys.
MCP: A protocol to bring context to IDEs
Coding assistants, such as LLM-powered IDEs like Cursor, Copilot and Windsurf, are at the center of a developer renaissance. Their adoption speed is unseen. Cursor became the fastest-growing SaaS in history, reaching $100 million ARR within 12 months of launch, and 70% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Copilot.
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