Best Developer tools MCP servers

Developer-tools MCP servers are the general-purpose primitives an agent leans on while it works: reading and writing files on disk, running code in a sandbox, and the other low-level building blocks that aren't tied to one SaaS product. The filesystem server is the quiet workhorse of the category — it gives an agent scoped, auditable access to read, edit, and search files within directories you explicitly allow, which is how most coding workflows actually touch your project. When choosing tools here, the security posture is everything: prefer servers that constrain access to an allow-list of directories or an isolated sandbox rather than the whole machine, and grant the narrowest scope that still lets the agent do its job.