How Invoca Made Claude Code and Cursor Agents 30% Faster and 40% Cheaper with Unblocked

Invoca's platform tracks and analyzes the phone calls that drive revenue for marketing, sales, and contact center teams. Behind it sits an engineering org that has gone all-in on agentic development: roughly half the developers work in Claude Code and the other half in Cursor, Cursor cloud agents run tasks on their own, and a dev enablement team keeps the whole agent experience consistent.

Danny Peck is a principal engineer on that team, seven years into his time at Invoca. "My customers are essentially the rest of the engineering team," he says. "We're very interested in tooling that makes our developers' lives easier. We get to solve the day-to-day friction in the lives of the people we work with." Part of that job is a distributed agent rules framework: a single set of instructions the team pushes out to every microservice repository each night, so every agent on every machine starts from the same playbook.

That framework is where Unblocked now sits. But the story starts before agents, with the question every engineer at every company eventually asks: where was that conversation?

The challenge: the quest through tribal knowledge#

"I don't even like thinking about those days," Danny says when asked about life before Unblocked. "I had this conversation somewhere. I don't remember if it was in Slack or buried in a Jira ticket, but it exists. So it's this quest through tribal knowledge. Start with keywords in Slack. That wasn't it. Maybe I'll ask my friend Steve, he was in the conversation. He doesn't know. Now he's looking in Slack threads and Jira tickets. It devolves into a group chat: where's that thread where we were talking about the thing? And it was buried in a Confluence article from two years ago that linked to a Jira ticket where the thread continued. Untold hours, spread across many people."

The hours were only the first cost. "There's the secondary tax of writing fresh documentation to replace what was stale," he says. "That's work nobody enjoys. It pulls you out of the flow, and it still might miss the full picture, because the knowledge is spread across so many sources."

Agents inherited the same gap in a more expensive form. Invoca's centralized rules had grown a long section telling agents which MCP server to call for what: GitHub for this, Slack for that, the Atlassian server for the other. Every source was one more thing to install on every developer's machine and one more instruction to maintain. Access to the sources was solved. Knowing which one held the correct answer was not.

The solution: one MCP at the top of the rules#

Today the search is a sentence. "Now it's literally, hey Unblocked, what was that thing we talked about with the calls we were dropping?" Danny says. "It synthesizes all of that. It finds the articles, it finds the thread in Jira, and by the way, here's a pull request that's related. You may not have been thinking about that."

"Not only will it answer your question, it gives you additional context you didn't realize you needed until that moment. That's such a huge unblock for us."

Danny Peck — Principal Engineer, Invoca

Then the team put Unblocked where its agents would find it first. "We have a single source of truth for all of our agent instructions, so we don't manage that at the individual repo level," Danny says. "One thing we had to do a lot of was write instructions for when to reach out to all these different MCP servers. We were immediately able to put Unblocked's MCP server at the top of that and replace a lot of them."

“Use Unblocked as the orchestrator. We don't need to maintain and install all these different MCP servers in everyone's configuration. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. And we came to find out it's actually more performant and token efficient than running all those servers.”

Danny Peck — Principal Engineer, Invoca

The change also removed a maintenance loop the team no longer thinks about. "You set it up once and manage the sources within Unblocked," Danny says. "If you want to add or remove a source later, you don't have to update your agent instructions and push them out to forty repositories."

Because every agent reaches Unblocked through the same endpoint, every agent starts with the same picture, whichever harness it runs in.

“With AI in general it's garbage in, garbage out. The more consistent that context layer looks between agent runs and between everyone's machines, the more predictable the outputs are when they get to code review. Whether you're in Cursor or Claude Code, it's the same MCP endpoint and the same tool calls.”

Danny Peck — Principal Engineer, Invoca

That includes the agents nobody is watching. Invoca runs Cursor cloud agents heavily, and Unblocked is in the cloud config. "For any run we can drill into the cloud agent instance and see the reasoning steps, when it called Unblocked, and which tickets, pages, and Slack threads it pulled in," Danny says. "We use that to fine-tune agent instructions."

The proof: 30% faster, 40% cheaper#

Before rolling Unblocked into every rule, the team measured it. During the proof of concept they built an A/B harness that ran the same task in two isolated agent runs, one with Unblocked and one without, and compared the results.

The first run set the tone. "We saw identical output quality in both arms, but the Unblocked arm completed three times faster wall clock," Danny says. That run used a few more tokens. It didn't matter. "It saved so much time that I'd call it a win."

Then they ran the full test: 20 tasks across multiple repositories.

“Median time was 30% faster with Unblocked, and median cost was 40% cheaper in total token spend. It was a cool experiment to see objectively that Unblocked not only gives you better context, it's faster and cheaper token-wise. A win-win across the board.”

Danny Peck — Principal Engineer, Invoca

A surprise: code review that finds bugs, not nits#

Danny's team expected little from AI code review. Every tool they'd seen insisted on three style comments per pull request. "Why is this tabbed weirdly? Unimportant things," he says. "Everyone expects AI slop. Low-hanging nit fruit."

Unblocked reviews differently because it reviews with the same context it answers with. "It applies that same tribal-knowledge brain to your code review. It's not doing nits. It's not even worried about nits. It's finding the bugs, the gotchas, the performance hiccups."

“We've already had a number of senior engineers come to our internal Unblocked channel to say, wow, this PR tool just found a bug in my code that all of us missed.”

Danny Peck — Principal Engineer, Invoca

The review doesn't stop at the first pass. "It gives you feedback, you push another change, and then it actually approves the thing," Danny says. "That thumbs up is a useful signal to the human at the end of the life cycle. They know a frontier model has taken this through a cycle and found no additional defects."

How the day to day changed: plan in Unblocked, build in the agent#

Danny keeps the Unblocked desktop app in his sidebar and has moved a stage of his work into it. "I do a lot of implementation planning in the Unblocked app now," he says. "I can have several threaded conversations in parallel, refine a plan in the morning, and when I'm ready to implement I take the output and transfer it right into my AI agent. Planning in a rich context environment before spending tokens in a coding agent feels like a new unlock."

The rest of the day is smaller questions that used to cost someone else their focus. "Before, it was: I'm going to interrupt Joe because I know he knows the answer. But so does Unblocked. So I'll bother Unblocked first." A colleague showed him the trick of starring the Unblocked bot in Slack so it sits at the top of the sidebar, and the team keeps a public channel for questions that don't belong anywhere in particular. "Everyone benefits from the answer," Danny says, "and it becomes useful context for agents and for Unblocked itself."

Not just for engineers: it went viral internally#

Unblocked came to Invoca for R&D. It didn't stay there.

“We decided we'd launch this to engineering. We did a quick fifteen-minute presentation, but other people come to those too, and immediately it was, 'this looks very useful'. It went viral internally. People outside engineering were signing up through GitHub. We'd approved 90 seats, it had been in the organization six days, and we already had 95.”

Danny Peck — Principal Engineer, Invoca

The reason, Danny thinks, is that the problem was never an engineering problem. "There are basic things we're always asking, like who owns this, without needing a service catalog. Questions like that are pervasive throughout the organization. Having a single search across Slack, Jira, Confluence, and GitHub that works for any department's knowledge problem is super powerful."

"It's immediately intuitive," he adds. "It's such a core problem that no one has solved well: how do you synthesize all of this tribal knowledge across all these places and do it in a clean, elegant way."

The bottom line for engineering leaders#

Ask Danny to total the time saved and he won't give you one number. "There's an intrinsic time savings that gets baked into every step of my life cycle, from planning through code review, and you stop thinking about it," he says. He can point to the adoption curve instead. "It became ubiquitous overnight. We can watch it in the analytics inside Unblocked. Every week engagement is higher than the week before."

“If we took it away tomorrow, there would be a mass revolt. It's so entrenched in everyone's day to day.”

Danny Peck — Principal Engineer, Invoca

He's thought about what life would be like if Unblocked disappeared suddenly. "You don't know what you have until it's gone. People would be trying to use it accidentally, forgetting it was disabled. Then the slow grumble of returning to the manual way of looking things up. We'd be much less productive and much less happy working each day."

"I can't imagine a world before Unblocked. It's simplified so many things we do, it's so good at the thing it does, and it's become ubiquitous and entrenched in all of our systems."

Get in touch with us today to see how Unblocked can be the context layer for your engineers and your agents.