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. Coding assistants were only limited to codebase context, which could help developers write code faster, but could not help with context switching. A new protocol is addressing this issue: Model Context Protocol (MCP). Released in November 2024 by Anthropic, it is an open standard developed to facilitate integration between AI systems, particularly LLM-based tools, and external tools and data sources. One of the most impactful applications of MCP is its ability to connect AI coding assistants directly to the tools developers rely on every day, streamlining workflows and dramatically reducing context switching. With MCP and modern AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude, that entire process can happen inside the editor. AI assistants and their MCP integrations are serving as the bridge to all these external tools. In effect, the IDE could become the new all-in-one command center for engineers, much like Slack has been for general knowledge workers.