Visual Studio Code and autodiscovery of MCP servers: better to stay in control.

Visual Studio Code in latest versions has an autodiscovery feature for MCP servers installed in your local machine that automatically permits you to import MCP configurations from other tools like Claude, Cursor, Windsurf (at the moment these are only AI tools supported):

This setting is enabled by default at the moment, so every time you load Visual Studio Code it check on the previously listed tools if you have new MCP servers configured and, if so, it imports their configuration into VS Code.

But sometimes you don’t want that…

Having tons of MCP servers installed in an AI tool is not always a great idea. When an agent runs, it analyzed the tools available and each MCP consumes token just for describing what is does, so IMO it’s better to have a clean configuration (just configure in your tool the MCP that you really need). Too much unuseful MCP servers installed into your AI tool can reduce your context window.

In Visual Studio Code, you can fully disable the previous option setting it to FALSE (so no MCP configurations will be imported automatically from other tools), or you can also specify the tools from where you always want the import of MCP configurations.

To do that, just do like in the following example (here I want to have MCP servers configuration only imported from Cursor):

Stay in control also on that…

P.S. Microsoft Visual Studio Code Team is thinking to set the autodiscovery feature of MCP servers to DISABLE by default in future versions of Visual Studio Code, so things could change in a near future.

Original Post https://demiliani.com/2025/08/22/visual-studio-code-and-autodiscovery-of-mcp-servers-better-to-stay-in-control/