Rethinking Idle Time: Developer Productivity Beyond the Keyboard

“Let your machine work for you, even when you’re not.”

Introduction

You step away for a coffee. Your machine goes quiet. The fans slow down, the CPU rests, and the developer tools—those same ones that were just a moment ago crunching builds, syncing code, or indexing files—pause their work, waiting for your return.

It’s a moment that happens dozens of times a day: in meetings, while responding to Slack, waiting for a test to run, or context-switching between branches.

But what if your machine didn’t go quiet?

What if, during those idle moments, it used its time to make your next build faster, your environment cleaner, or your tools more responsive?

This is the idea behind MDX Daemon, a lightweight background service that quietly performs useful developer tasks during idle time—so you don't have to think about them later.

The Cost Of Inaction

Most developer workflows today are reactive. Nothing happens unless you trigger it—build the app, sync the project, run the tests. And if you're not actively doing something, your machine just waits.

This made sense in an era when compute was limited and tasks needed to be precise and intentional. But modern developer machines are powerful, underutilized, and frequently idle—not because they’ve finished their work, but because no one told them what to do next.

That idle time is a missed opportunity.

We’ve all felt the friction of small, repetitive delays:

• Switching to a teammate’s branch and waiting for Gradle to sync
• Launching a demo app only to hit stale dependencies and slow first builds
• Caches not available for targets because dependencies are out of sync
• Local environments becoming misaligned after a few days of feature work

These things don’t break your flow outright—but they bend it. They chip away at momentum. And they’re almost always predictable and preventable.

So the question becomes: what if our machines could act proactively, using idle time to prepare for what we’re likely to do next?

Introducing MDX Daemon

MDX Daemon is a local-first background service that runs developer tasks during idle windows. It’s designed to be quiet, safe, and entirely non-blocking—intelligently using underutilized compute to do work you’d otherwise delay, forget, or reluctantly do under pressure.

Think of it as a second brain for your machine—one that works with your tools, not around them.

Examples of what it can do:

• Pre-build app targets you’re likely to run
• Run ./gradlew :module:configuration after you switch branches to boost config cache hits
• Clean up stale build artifacts or test outputs
• Warm up dependency graphs
• Sync feature flags or regenerate code based on your project’s recent activity

These are the tasks that often fall into the “I’ll get to it later” bucket. MDX Daemon gets to them now—during the in-between moments.

It operates on a catalog of simple, pluggable jobs triggered by context: Git activity, idle CPU, recent build history. Everything is local. No cloud orchestration. Just your machine doing more with what it already has.

Real Impact From Day One

One of the earliest wins from using MDX Daemon was a 10% increase in Gradle configuration cache hit rate across the team.

That improvement may sound small, but the underlying performance impact is anything but:

• Builds with a configuration cache hit average 72 seconds
• Builds that miss the cache average 290 seconds

That’s nearly a 4x difference. And by warming up configuration tasks in the background, we’re now seeing faster, more consistent build experiences—without developers needing to think about it.

(For more context, see my earlier blog post on enabling Gradle Configuration Cache.)

And these improvements came from just a handful of jobs. As we expand the catalog to include more tasks—like syncing demo apps, warming up flag state, or validating integration environments—we expect the compound effect to grow.

Why It Works

MDX Daemon is built on a few simple but deliberate principles:

• Non-Intrusive: It only runs during idle moments. If you’re working, it backs off completely.
• Proactive, Not Reactive: It doesn’t wait for your command—it anticipates your likely next step.
• Local-First: Every job runs on your machine.
• Pluggable by Design: You define the jobs that matter most. Start small, expand over time.
• Safe by Default: Jobs fail silently and never block your workflow. Logs are available if needed.

The philosophy is simple: use what you already have (time + compute) to improve what you already do (develop).

Closing Thoughts

Developer productivity isn’t just about the tools we use while we’re typing. It’s about how much support we have when we’re not—during the countless micro-moments when our attention is elsewhere and our machines are waiting.

MDX Daemon is an experiment in reclaiming those moments—quietly, incrementally, and intentionally. It’s already helping us reduce friction, smooth out workflows, and make our environments feel just a little more intelligent.

And this is just the beginning.

Every team has tasks they wish would "just happen"—but never seem to have time for. MDX Daemon shows us we do have time. We’ve just never taught our machines how to use it.

So now we’re asking: What would your daemon do?