The Vision of Theia AI: Empowering Tool Builders with full control over AI Solutions

In recent years, the trend toward open-source platforms for developer tools is more and more undermined by the rise of proprietary AI integrations. Tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor IDE, or Codeium, while innovative, are not designed to be customizable and often lack extensibility, openness, transparency and flexibility. This shift introduces challenges for tool builders and developers, not only in terms of customizability and data privacy but also in terms of a strong dependency on proprietary platforms of a single vendor.

In this article, we introduce the vision of Theia AI, a versatile and fully open source technology designed as a robust platform for companies looking to efficiently build AI-enhanced tools with their unique functionalities. Theia AI allows a tailored and flexible AI integration in tools and IDEs, including custom and domain-specific tools. It provides full control over relevant data and processes and last but not least Theia AI enables maintaining full strategic independence from any single commercial vendor.

Theia AI, as part of the Theia platform, is designed to enable tool builders in enhancing existing tools and IDEs with tailored AI features and in building fully AI-driven applications. Leveraging Theia AI as a powerful AI tool integration platform, also the Theia IDE will integrate Theia AI to provide AI features for developers as a showcase in an experimental preview. Both, Theia AI and the integration in the Theia IDE will be available with the upcoming Theia release 1.54.

The Vision of Theia AI

As outlined in our previous article, the rise of closed-source AI tools is a threat to open-source tool platforms and open-source software development environments. Proprietary AI integrations often limit customizability, flexibility and transparency. They tend to lock in users into vendor-specific subscription models, raising concerns about data privacy and open innovation. For tool builders this also poses the risk on a strategic level, as current solutions push them onto a proprietary platform of a single vendor and into a strong dependency, without any flexibility and control. These concerns are especially relevant when dealing with a key technology or tool in your company, sensitive data and IP. Furthermore, many modern AI-assisted tools and IDEs operate on a company’s core assets, such as source code, hardware designs, or other critical domain-specific data. Finally, existing AI solutions often focus on coding, their lack of flexibility make them inadequate for custom use cases or domain-specific tools.

With Theia AI, we equip tool builders with a versatile AI integration platform, which significantly simplifies the development of AI capabilities for their custom tools and IDEs, while giving them full control over their AI integrations end-to-end — from the UI of the tool to LLM and back. With this approach, Theia AI aims to eliminate the entry barriers for tool builders—such as vendor lock-ins, data privacy concerns, and development effort—while ensuring they can benefit from the immense advantages of modern LLMs integrated into their tools.

Theia AI addresses these challenges by offering an AI tool integration platform that prioritizes the principles of extensibility, openness, transparency, full control, and flexibility at its core. Besides a lot of reusable support to significantly lower the effort for building AI solutions, Theia AI empowers tool providers — and, optionally, their end users, such as developers — with the following unique capabilities:.

1. Tailorability and Extensibility for Tool Builders: Theia AI is crafted for tool builders, offering a highly tailorable, extensible and fully open source framework. This allows them to create custom and domain-specific AI-driven tools for their users, even beyond code editors - fully controlled by the tool provider.
2. Full control of Communication: Tool builders have full control and visibility of the communication between their tool and any underlying AI component or LLM. This level of transparency can optionally be even exposed to end users.

3. Full control of Data Interactions: Theia AI enables tool builders to fully integrate AI solutions into their tools by providing complete access to necessary data and functions, while also offering explicit control over any data accessed or modified by the LLM, such as file access or automatic changes like inserted code snippets. Additionally, tool providers can ensure that end users are fully aware of any sensitive data interactions.
4. Prompt Management: Theia AI provides a flexible and powerful prompt template registry to store, manage and even dynamically fine-tune their LLM requests for their specific environments, use cases and underlying LLMs at runtime. Prompts can be made visible and adaptable to experts, testers and even to end users allowing an agile prompt refinement process.

Prompt Editing at runtime in Theia AI

5. Flexibility in Choosing LLMs: Theia AI supports integrating arbitrary LLMs, enabling tool providers to use their preferred models and hosting environments, whether cloud-based, self-hosted, or local solutions, providing greater independence from proprietary constraints. Theia AI also supports tool providers to make this configuration available to end users.

Theia AI embraces extensibility, full control and flexibility, as a framework for tool builders. It also enables tool builders to equip their end users with the flexibility to change LLMs, prompts, or review LLM interactions. However, the framework ultimately leaves the decision in the hands of the tool builders of how much control and visibility to expose to the end users.

What is Theia AI and Who is it for?

Theia AI is part of the Theia platform, an open, flexible, and extensible platform for efficiently developing and delivering cloud and desktop IDEs and tools. The Theia IDE is a standard IDE built on the Theia Platform and integrates Theia AI to implement early access AI support as a showcase for Theia AI.

Theia AI: Targeted at Tool Builders looking to build AI-driven features in custom tools and tailored IDEs, Theia AI provides a robust technical framework within the Theia platform for seamless AI integration.

Theia IDE: Theia AI is incorporated into the Theia IDE, available for end users and serving as a proof of concept and providing early access to advanced AI features in a modern, open-source development environment offering a truly open and flexible AI experience.

Theia AI as a framework allows the efficient implementation of AI agents for tools and IDEs. Besides the above mentioned capabilities, the basic frame provides common features like LLM access, a customizable chat view, variable resolving for tool context retrieval, prompt templating, agent configuration, etc.

The Theia IDE includes concrete agents built on this frame for developers, focusing on supporting developers in their daily coding tasks. This is not only a showcase but also enables software developers to benefit from advanced AI capabilities directly within the Theia IDE.

Theia AI is not limited to code or classic IDEs though. Its flexible architecture makes it ideal for building AI assistants in various domain-specific tools, including graphical editors, form-based configuration tools, or tools for analytics. The screenshot below shows an example of a graphical editor powered by Theia AI.

When implementing custom tools based on Theia AI, tool creators can benefit from the technical infrastructure for integrating AI capabilities in their tools. When adopting the Theia platform and Theia AI for custom tools, tool creators have the option to propagate some of Theia AI capabilities, e.g. prompt editing to their users too or tailor these aspects according to their specific needs.

Current State and Community Involvement

Theia AI as a framework for tool builders will be available in Theia starting with the 1.54 release (see this PR). Despite being in a beta stage, Theia AI is already very successfully used by tool builders and our customer projects to create innovative AI solutions. Based on further adoption and feedback, we will optimize APIs and gather feedback from the community. We invite tool builders to actively shape the future of the project by contributing ideas, novel features, and suggestions to refine its capabilities. Get in contact with us, if you want to discuss use cases or need support.

For end users, the AI support in the Theia IDE (based on Theia AI) will also be available as an optional experimental feature with 1.54, allowing early adopters to explore Theia AI in a showcase firsthand and provide feedback. With this experimental version, we invite developers to explore its potential, provide valuable feedback, develop new ideas, and actively contribute to the evolution of Theia AI within the Theia IDE. Your participation is key to shaping the future of this innovative tool.

We believe that embracing openness and fostering collaboration within the community will significantly accelerate innovation in the field of AI-augmented tools and IDEs, surpassing the limitations often seen in closed-source solutions, where collaborative efforts are restricted or non-existing.

Join us in pioneering the first truly extensible, open and flexible AI support in tools and IDEs. Whether you are a tool builder or AI enthusiast, an individual developer or part of a large organization, as an early contributor, you will have the opportunity to directly influence the development and shape the capabilities of Theia AI.

If you want to sponsor the project or use Theia AI to create your own AI solution, please get in contact with us. In particular, we are also looking for LLM providers who want to make their language models available via Theia AI or in the Theia IDE.

Conclusion

We believe Theia AI sets a new standard for AI integration in tools and development environments, aligned with the best practices of open-source communities. The potential for innovation through openness and community collaboration is immense, allowing tool builders and developers to push the boundaries of what AI can achieve in tools and development environments. Together, we are creating a truly extensible, open, innovative, and user-centric future for tool builders, users and their AI-enhanced tools. Theia AI is already actively adopted by tool builders. New workflows and use cases for AI integrations are identified on a daily basis, thanks to the system’s flexibility. Even as a test user, you can adapt the solution in the blink of an eye by customizing and adjusting prompt templates, project context, and workflows to your specific needs.

In the upcoming days, we will publish more preview articles about Theia AI, showcasing its capabilities and features with concrete examples. Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter to stay up to date!

EclipseSource is at the forefront of technological innovation, ready to guide and support your AI initiatives. Our comprehensive AI integration services provide the specialized know-how necessary to develop customized, AI-enhanced solutions that elevate your tools and IDEs. Explore how we can assist you and your organization in integrating AI into your tools with our AI technology services. Reach out to begin your AI integration project with us.