Now that generative AI has found one of its major use cases in the software development workflow new tools are entering the market every week. Every SaaS product seems to be adding MCP servers and publishing them. That’s a topic needing another post ! Code editors are added AI support at various levels. Zed Editor even took the step to add a flag to disable AI completely!

Editors and plugins are running in sandboxes and it provides some level of security. But browser access, CLI access etc are still possible, supply chain attacks on the MCP plugins added to the editors can introduce bugs. And then there are AI hallucinations or mistakes that alters the file system. With developer machines often possessing SSH keys and similar information, we are indeed in uncharted waters.

How Typos are handled ?

I have got Cline with Puppeteer MCP installed in VS code. In the instructions to Cline, used the spelling pupetteer & Cline happily passed this on to Claude Sonnet 4 and needless to say a the MCP was promptly invoked, followed by Chrome and browsing started. (Obviously, It asked me for permission).

Needless to say, this is the first time development environments have become “stupid” enough to hallucinate & decide actions by its own.

Where do we go from here ?

Make sure to isolate the development environments and use known MCP servers and plugins with the IDE. Watchout for Supply chain attacks.

Stay Safe!