Testing the AI-Powered Theia IDE and Theia AI Applications for Free Using GitHub Models

GitHub has recently introduced GitHub Models, a free service that allows developers to experiment with selected AI models via an API. While this service is not suitable for production use due to rate limits and content filtering, it provides an excellent opportunity to experiment with the AI-powered Theia IDE or any custom application built with Theia AI before committing to a paid hosting provider.

If you’re unfamiliar with Theia AI or the AI-powered Theia IDE, check out the Theia AI introduction and the AI Theia IDE overview, download the AI-powered Theia IDE and check out Theia Coder.

What is “GitHub Models”?

GitHub Models is designed for learning, experimentation, and proof-of-concept activities. It allows developers to interact with AI models through an SDK or a chat interface. However, this feature is subject to various limits, such as requests per minute, daily requests, and tokens per request. Content filters are also enforced and cannot be disabled.

For more details, see GitHub’s official documentation: Responsible Use of GitHub Models.

Why Use GitHub Models for Theia AI?

If you’re evaluating AI-powered features in Theia IDE or testing a custom Theia AI-based tool, GitHub Models provides an easy and free way to experiment. While you may hit rate limits quickly, it allows you to explore Theia AI’s capabilities without immediate investment. As Theia AI supports any LLM, you have full freedom in selecting Cloud-based models (Azure, Anthropic, OpenAI, Hugging Face, and any OpenAI-compatible API) or even Local models (Ollama, Llama-File, and other self-hosted options).

Setting Up GitHub Models for Theia AI

1. Choose a Model

Browse available models at GitHub Marketplace. For example, you can use OpenAI compatible models such as OpenAI GPT-4o or o3-mini.

2. Generate a GitHub Token

Create a GitHub token with no permissions.

3. Configure Theia AI

Add the following settings to your AI-powered Theia IDE settings file:

"ai-features.openAiCustom.customOpenAiModels":  [
    {
        "model":  "o3-mini",
        "url":  "https://models.inference.ai.azure.com",
        "id":  "o3-mini-azure-test",
        "apiKey":  "yourGithubToken",
        "enableStreaming":  true,
        "developerMessageSettings":  "developer"
    }
]

4. Use the Model in Theia IDE

Once configured, you can select this model for any AI agent, such as Theia Coder. Open the AI configuration view, select an agent and select the id of the LLM you configured before (see the documentation for more details). The following videos demonstrate Theia Coder in action using o3-mini hosted on GitHub Models. As a preparation, we have asked Theia Coder:

@Coder Generate a snake game as a node-based web application

Which will fully bootstrap a game that looks like this:

In the following video, we switch to o3-mini hosted on Github and adapt the colors used in the game

The result of this simple change looks then like this:

👉 Learn more about Theia Coder - the open AI coding agent with full control

Important Note

GitHub Models is not designed for production use, and you may quickly run into rate limits, such as:

“429 Rate limit of 15 per 86400s exceeded for UserByModelByDay. Please wait 85108 seconds before retrying.”

For a full guide on setting up GitHub Models, see: Prototyping with AI Models.

For more information on how to set-up LLMs and LLM provider in the AI-powered Theia IDE and Theia AI:

👉 See our user documentation for the AI-powered Theia IDE

Conclusion

By leveraging GitHub Models, you can evaluate Theia AI-powered applications at no cost before selecting a production-ready AI provider. As Theia AI allows you to select any LLM, you can evaluate Github Models and then switch to any commercial provider of your choice.

If you are interested in building custom AI-powered Tools, EclipseSource provides consulting and implementation services backed by our extensive experience with successful AI tool projects. We also specialize in web- and cloud-based tools and support for popular platforms like Eclipse Theia and VS Code.

👉 Get in touch with us to learn more.