I've come to the same conclusions mentioned in most of that and done most of that already. I was an early-adopter of LLM tech, and have my own coding agent system, written in python. Soon I'm about to port those tools over to MCP so that I can just use VSCode for most everything, and never even need my Gradio Chatbot that I wrote to learn how to write tools, and use tools.

My favorite tool that I've written is one that simply lets me specify named blocks by name, in a prompt, and AI figures out how to use the tool to read each block. A named block is defined like:

# block_begin MyBlock ...lines of code # block_end

So I can just embed those blocks around the code rather change pasting into prompts.