Introducing the AI-powered Theia IDE: AI-driven coding with full Control

We’re happy to announce the alpha release of the AI-powered Theia IDE, the open source development environment that puts the power of AI in your hands—with full transparency and control. Unlike proprietary AI-powered coding tools that lock you into opaque ecosystems, Theia IDE gives you complete visibility and flexibility over your AI interactions.

Reclaiming Control Over AI-Assisted Development

In today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape, most development tools are steering towards closed, proprietary approaches where users have limited insight into how AI operates in their environment. The AI-powered Theia IDE takes a fundamentally different approach—built on the open Theia AI framework, it empowers developers with:

• Complete LLM Freedom: Connect to any AI model of your choice—cloud-hosted, self-hosted, or fully local—without being locked into a single vendor. Use OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Ollama, Llama-File, Hugging Face, or any LLM of your choice with simple configuration changes. 👉 Why Theia supports any LLM!

• Full Transparency: See exactly what project data and context is being sent between your IDE and the AI, inspect prompts, functions, variables, as well as the complete communication history.

• Customizable Prompts and Agents: Modify the prompts used for any specific AI capability in the IDE, tailor them to your project needs and coding standards - or create new agentic workflows from scratch within minutes! 👉 How to create a custom Git Agent

Introducing Theia Coder: Your Open AI Coding Assistant

At the heart of the AI-powered Theia IDE is Theia Coder, an advanced AI coding assistant that can generate and modify code based on natural language instructions—all while keeping you in complete control. Whether you’re working on a new project or modifying an existing codebase, Theia Coder streamlines your workflow by:

• Generating complete applications from natural language descriptions
• Modifying existing code with contextual awareness of your project structure
• Supporting Context augmentation: Augment the context of a task flexibly with files or snippets to improve the precision. Keep track of what content Theia Coder processes and what information it requests.
• Applying changes transparently with a review process before any modifications take effect
• Adapting to your workflow rather than dictating how you work

Theia Coder even allows you to specify what changes you need in natural language on the level of requirements rather than having to specify exactly how your code needs to change on code level. Every AI-suggested code change can then be reviewed and subsequently applied automatically in the IDE. In the example shown below, Theia Coder refactors an existing web application (a “quiz”) and adds the option to skip questions for end users of the quiz application.

Theia Coder shows you every step of its process—you can see which files it examines, review proposed changes in a diff editor, and accept modifications individually or as a whole, ensuring you remain in control throughout the entire process. The video above shows an example change on an existing project done with Theia Coder. Also check out the article linked below to see more examples and learn how to get started with it!

👉 Introducing Theia Coder - the open AI coding agent with full control

Comprehensive Set of AI Agents Beyond Coding

Apart from the Theia Coder agent, the AI-powered Theia IDE ships with a suite of additional agents designed to enhance your development experience:

AI-powered code completion in the Theia IDE.

• AI-powered Code Completion: Let AI support you in writing code via live and inline code suggestions
• Terminal Assistant: Get help writing and executing terminal commands with context-aware suggestions
• Architect Chat Agent: Ask questions about your project files, folder structure, and source code
• Universal Chat Agent: Receive assistance on programming and development-related questions
• Command Chat Agent: Access IDE commands through natural language
• Orchestrator Chat Agent: Let the IDE select the most appropriate AI agent based on your query
• Your own custom agent: The Theia IDE allows you to create your own agents on the fly; to design custom AI capabilities tailored to your specific workflows. Automate testing, writing documentation, reviewing PRs, all within one tool and on your own terms!

See our documentation for an overview of the available agents and how to create your own from scratch.

True LLM Independence: The Power of Choice

The AI-powered Theia IDE ships with comprehensive support for a wide range of LLM providers right out of the box. Unlike proprietary tools that lock you into specific AI services or subscriptions, Theia IDE gives you the freedom to:

• Mix and match models for different tasks—use one model for code completion and another for chat–you can even customize the model for each single AI capability in the Theia IDE
• Configure new LLMs at runtime, even those released in the future—thanks to the LLM configuration features for specifying LLM endpoints at runtime
• Maintain privacy and security with local or self-hosted models for sensitive projects, such as Ollama or Llama-File

The active open source community of Theia is actively contributing extensions or even new LLM providers to keep the compatibility with a wide range of options including OpenAI (including o3-mini, o1 and GPT-4.5), Anthropic (including Sonnet-3.7), OpenAI compatible API (e.g. Azure or DeepSeek), Hugging Face API, Ollama and Llama-File.

👉 Why Theia supports any LLM!

This flexibility ensures you’re never locked into a specific subscription, pricing model, or AI provider. As new models are released—which happens frequently in today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape—you can immediately integrate them into your workflow without having to wait for tool updates. See our documentation on supported LLMs.

MCP Integration: Connecting Your AI to External Tools

Through the Model Contextual Protocol (MCP) integration, the AI-powered Theia IDE connects seamlessly with external tools and services. This powerful capability allows you to:

• Integrate with third-party services and contextual data sources, such as Git, Github, Data Bases, Testing Frameworks, Internet Search and much more!
• Use MCP features to build tailored AI agents for your specific development needs

As a user you can pick and choose from the rapidly growing ecosystem of available MCP servers. Also checkout:

👉 Let AI Commit (to) Your Work - With Theia AI, Git, and MCP: Discover how to create a custom Git Agent in Theia IDE that automates Git operations with simple natural-language prompts, making AI-assisted development more efficient (see also video below)

👉 Introducing Anthropics’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) for AI-Powered Tools in Theia AI and the Theia IDE: Learn how MCP enables seamless integration with external tools, bringing web search, GitHub access, database operations, and more to AI-powered development environments.

SCANOSS Integration: Ensuring Open Source Compliance

The AI-powered Theia IDE comes with built-in SCANOSS integration that automatically scans AI-generated code for open source licensing compliance. This helps you to identify potential open source components in generated code and maintain compliance with licensing requirements when incorporating AI-generated code.

The screenshot below shows an example where ScanOSS has found a match in the generated code. The user can investigate the match details including the project, in which the match was found and the  license of the matched project—all details you need for a comprehensive compliance check.

All changes generated in the Chat or via Theia Coder can be automatically scanned using the SCANOSS service. For more details, check the SCANOSS documentation. We will provide more details about this feature soon, follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date.

Built on Open and Flexible Foundations

The AI capabilities of the Theia IDE are built on the Theia AI framework, a flexible open-source platform that enables adopters to implement advanced AI capabilities in Theia-based tools, while maintaining full control over every aspect of their AI integration.

For users, this means you can leverage the power of this dynamic AI framework in your IDE, including features like prompt editing, custom agents, LLM freedom, and MCP integration. You are not restricted by predefined AI behaviors and you can shape your AI-assisted development experience to fit your workflow.

For tool builders and organizations interested in integrating AI capabilities into custom tools and IDEs, explore the Theia AI framework—the open platform for empowering your tool with high-end AI capabilities on your terms, adapted to the requirements, languages, formats and workflows of your domain. Theia AI provides reusable building blocks for integrating AI into custom tools and IDEs. Beyond offering core AI functionalities and fully customizable UX, the framework enables deep extensibility, allowing you to customize agents, implement domain-specific knowledge and context augmentation, refine prompt interactions, integrate proprietary AI models, and design custom agentic AI workflows without reinventing the wheel, while ensuring vendor independence, data governance, and a future-proof architecture.

Theia AI has been officially released as a stable framework today. Explore its capabilities and how it can support your AI-powered development tools.
👉 Learn more about Theia AI

Get Started and Join the Open Source AI Development Movement

Ready to experience the future of open, transparent AI-assisted development? Download the alpha release of the AI-powered Theia IDE today and join the community shaping the next generation of development tools. Visit theia-ide.org to download the AI-powered Theia IDE and explore our documentation to get started.

As a Developer

👉 Download and Try the AI-powered Theia IDE! Experience its full transparency and customization capabilities.

👉 Provide feedback! Help shape the next iteration by sharing your thoughts.

👉 Adapt it to your needs and contribute! The IDE is flexible and open-source, so you can tweak it and contribute improvements.

As a Company

👉 Evaluate Theia IDE as an open solution that provides full control over AI interactions, ensuring compliance and security. Contact us to discuss your feedback and requirements.

👉 Consider sponsoring Theia and Theia IDE to support the sustainability of open AI-driven development.

As a Tool Builder

👉 Adopt The Theia Tool Platform and Theia AI to build your own tailored tool offerings. Whether you need AI-assisted coding, document generation, or domain-specific tool support, Theia AI provides an open, extensible and solid foundation.

👉 Benefit from EclipseSource’s expertise. Leverage our consulting and implementation services to accelerate development and create cutting-edge AI-powered tools.

The alpha release of the AI-powered Theia IDE represents a milestone in our mission to provide developers with powerful AI capabilities that don’t compromise on transparency, control, or flexibility.

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 about how we can help you build custom AI-powered tools.

Additional Interesting reads:

👉 Introducing Theia AI - the Open Framework for Building AI-native Custom Tools and IDEs

👉 Why Theia supports any LLM!

👉 How to create a custom Git Agent with Theia AI and MCP

👉 Introducing Theia Coder - the open AI coding agent with full control

👉 Our service offerings for build AI-native tools and IDEs