Introducing Theia AI: The Open Framework for Building AI-native Custom Tools and IDEs

We are excited to announce the public release of Theia AI, an open framework that empowers tool vendors to seamlessly integrate cutting-edge AI capabilities into their custom tools and IDEs. As part of the industry-proven Eclipse Theia tool platform and validated through extensive adoption in real-world applications, Theia AI is ready to transform domain-specific environments and specialized IDEs into fully AI-native tools—enabling your domain users to take advantage of advanced AI features deeply embedded into highly specialized tools.

How Theia AI Addresses the Challenges of Building AI-Native Tools and IDEs

While there is a rapidly growing market demand for AI-native tools and IDEs, tool vendors face a significant challenge to meet this demand: implementing these high-value AI capabilities requires substantial investment across all layers—from rich AI chat user interfaces to LLM communication, prompt management, and tool functions—forcing most vendors to build even common AI integration components for their tools and IDEs from scratch.

Theia AI changes this situation by providing a state-of-the-art, open-source framework that handles the complex platform-level aspects of AI integration, specifically focused on tools and IDEs. This removes the barrier for tool vendors of kicking-off AI features and allows them to focus exclusively on customizing the AI features for their domain-specific requirements. Unlike proprietary solutions, Theia AI offers complete control over all aspects—from LLM selection and hosting options to user experience and agent behavior.

With this powerful combination of ready-made AI infrastructure and extensive flexibility, tool vendors can now rapidly evolve their specialized tool environments into cutting-edge AI-native solutions matching even the latest commercial AI-IDE offerings while preserving their unique domain focus and specialized functionality.

Full Control Over Your AI Integration

Unlike proprietary AI solutions that lock you into specific ecosystems, Theia AI puts you in complete control of your AI integration across four critical dimensions:

1. Control Over User Experience

Design a fully customized AI experience with flexible chat interfaces, inline suggestions, or entirely custom UI elements. Embed AI capabilities into any part of your tool—whether your custom editors, configuration panels, or standard IDE components like terminals and code editors. You determine exactly how and where AI interactions appear to your users.

2. Control Over AI Agents, Tool Context and Functions

Create domain-specific AI agents equipped with specialized knowledge for your domain that can interact natively with your tool components. These agents can be designed to obtain relevant context and support users by automating workflows through your custom tool actions. Manage context data with a powerful prompt system and enable direct AI interaction with your tool through powerful function-calling support.

3. Control Over Language Models and Business Model

Connect to any AI model of your choice—cloud-based services, self-hosted solutions, or fully local LLMs. This flexibility lets you balance reasoning capabilities, response time, and cost requirements specific to your domain and users. Design your pricing models that align with your business strategy, from subscriptions to pay-as-you-go or fully offline solutions. Read more about why LLM flexibility is crucial for tool vendors.

4. Control Over Integrations and Data

Integrate AI seamlessly into your tool ecosystem with full control over APIs, databases, and services. Theia AI also supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for integrating with a huge ecosystem of third-party features and systems. As a tool provider, however, you determine exactly what data is shared with AI services—essential for accommodating your customers’ unique privacy requirements and ensuring compliance with their security and governance policies.

Key Features of Theia AI

Theia AI provides all essential infrastructure for effective AI integration: stream-based LLM communication with support for tool calling and structured output, management of LLM settings and API tokens, as well as convenient means to record and trace LLM communication for prompt debugging. Its versatile chat interface features an intuitive and powerful UX, including agent-switching with autocompletion, conversation management, and more. Beyond these core capabilities, Theia AI offers several additional features uniquely designed for tool vendors developing a tailored, high-end AI integration for their custom tools. Here are the highlights:

Designing Specialized Agents

Build AI agents customized for your domain’s knowledge and workflows. Theia AI offers ready components for function calling, context retrieval, and enables integrating externally hosted agent behaviors, vector databases, knowledge graphs, or other state-of-the-art AI components. Take full control by coding agent behavior yourself or implementing sophisticated multi-agent systems that collaborate on complex tasks. Learn more about developing custom agents.

Truly Interactive AI Chats

Move beyond one-shot responses with AI agents that engage users in dynamic, multi-step interactions. Theia AI’s interactive flows allow agents to request clarifications, present actionable options, and guide users through complex workflows—all within a single multi-step response. Interactive AI flows make even complex AI-driven workflows more intuitive for users and allow involving the user in an efficient manner. Explore interactive AI flows in Theia AI.

Context-Aware AI Support

Provide your agents with the relevant context by integrating advanced context retrieval techniques and let users scope their requests by conveniently dragging files, symbols, or domain-specific elements into the chat. Smart context suggestions appear as users type, making complex queries simpler and results more relevant to the current task. Explore Theia AI’s flexible chat context variable system of Theia AI.

Organized AI Change Suggestions

Keep AI-proposed changes organized and manageable through structured Change Sets. This approach separates suggestions from conversation, enabling users to systematically review, refine, and apply complex modifications across multiple resources—from code files to domain-specific artifacts. Users maintain full control while benefiting from AI assistance on changes that span multiple resources. Discover how Theia AI’s change sets simplify complex change suggestions.

Theia AI enables agents to collect and suggest changes in a structured AI staging view, whether it is files or custom configuration artifacts or models, easy to understand, review, refine and apply for users.

Integrate AI Into Custom Editors, Views, and More

Extend AI capabilities beyond text editors into your specialized tool components. Theia AI enables you to seamlessly integrate AI with your non-textual interfaces—form editors, diagrams, custom views—providing contextual suggestions, auto-completions, and intelligent assistance directly where users work. Discover how Theia AI supports more than Code Completion and AI Chats.

Advanced Prompt Management

Prompts are the heart of your custom AI-native tool. Leverage Theia AI’s prompt management system with dynamic templates, prompt variants, reusable fragments, and runtime modifications that enable rapid development iterations and even user customization options. Explore the Theia AI documentation to learn more.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Support

Enhance your AI-powered tool with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, enabling seamless integration with external tools like web search, databases, file systems, and more. MCP support adds a vast ecosystem of context sources and functions to your AI-powered environments. Explore an example of adopting MCP for automating Git workflows in the Theia IDE.

Flexible LLM Integration

Choose the right AI model for your specific needs—balancing reasoning capabilities, response time, and costs. Theia AI works with multiple LLM providers out of the box, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, and local options like Ollama. The extensible architecture makes it easy to add new providers or even configure models at runtime, ensuring your tool can adapt as AI technology evolves. Discover why Theia supports any LLM and why this flexibility is essential for enterprise-grade tool integration.

High-End AI Capabilities At Your Choice

While custom tools are designed for specific domains and their unique requirements, they often include standard IDE features like code editors, terminals, and debugging tools. Theia AI seamlessly integrates with the Theia tool platform, offering premium IDE functionality that tool vendors can select, integrate, and customize for their Theia-based solutions. The same flexibility applies to AI capabilities. The AI-powered Theia IDE delivers cutting-edge features for software development, including intelligent code completion, terminal assistance, and code generation. Tool vendors can incorporate these AI features into their products and tailor them to address domain-specific needs. Learn more about Theia IDE’s advanced AI features.

Customizable In Every Aspect

Tailor every facet of your AI integration to match your specific domain and brand. Theia AI’s modular architecture allows customization at all levels—from chat UI components to agent behavior and underlying infrastructure. As an example, Theia AI provides ready-to-use elements like chat views to format AI responses with markdown, rich code blocks and contextual controls, like buttons, while enabling you to extend or replace AI response parts with custom widgets and specialized visualizations. Learn how to create fully customized AI experiences that feel native to your tool environment. Visit the Theia AI documentation for more information.

See Theia AI in Action: Explore the AI-powered Theia IDE

Theia AI has been adopted and matured in industry-grade tool products across various domains. Besides closed-source, domain-specific tools, Theia AI also powers the open-source AI-enabled Theia IDE—a flexible, extensible development environment.

This AI-powered Theia IDE not only validates the technology in real-world scenarios but also serves as a comprehensive reference implementation. Tool vendors can explore this codebase for practical examples of AI integration patterns, specialized agent implementations, and customized UI components—accelerating their own development of AI-powered tools and domain-specific IDEs.

We invite you to experience Theia AI firsthand by downloading the AI-powered Theia IDE. Explore its rich AI features—from contextual code completions to intelligent refactorings and interactive chat-based assistance (with “Theia Coder”)—to see how these capabilities could transform your own specialized tools. The open-source implementation provides a practical blueprint for building sophisticated AI integrations in your custom environments.

👉 Learn more in the AI-powered Theia IDE alpha release announcement

Open Architecture and Governance

Theia AI is built as an extensible and adaptable framework integrated into the Eclipse Theia platform. It is fully open source and supports a commercial-friendly governance model, ensuring independence from any single vendor. By joining this active ecosystem, you gain access to collective innovation and expertise from diverse contributors committed to advancing AI tooling through collaboration rather than closed platforms.

Getting Started with Theia AI

Ready to explore how Theia AI can enhance your custom tools and IDEs? Here’s how to get started:

1. Explore the Documentation: Visit the Theia AI documentation for comprehensive guides and examples.

2. Try the AI-Powered Theia IDE: Experience Theia AI’s capabilities firsthand bydownloading the AI-powered Theia IDE and see the AI-powered Theia IDE alpha release announcement.

3. Join the Community: Become part of the active Theia community by contributing to the project and participating in discussions.

4. Contact us to discuss your use case and get our support to build your own AI-native solution!

Conclusion

Theia AI marks a significant advancement in AI integration for tool vendors and IDE builders. By providing an open, flexible framework that handles the complex infrastructure of AI capabilities, Theia AI eliminates the barrier to entry for creating truly AI-native specialized tools. The framework’s unique combination of ready-made components and complete customization control enables you to rapidly deliver domain-specific AI features that preserve your tool’s unique identity while matching the capabilities of leading commercial AI tools.

As AI reshapes software development and specialized domains, Theia AI offers a sustainable path forward—one that balances innovation with governance, flexibility with stability, and powerful capabilities with user-centric design. This open approach ensures your AI investment remains future-proof while accelerating your time-to-market.

Ready to elevate your product into a cutting-edge, AI-native tool? EclipseSource is committed to supporting your journey every step of the way. 👉 Reach out to us today to discuss how Theia AI can address your specific requirements and help you deliver exceptional AI experiences for your users. Learn more about our service offerings to build tailored AI-native tools and IDEs.

Additional Interesting reads:

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

👉 Introducing Interactive AI Flows in Theia AI

👉 Why Theia supports any LLM!

👉 Enhancing Your Tools with Chat Context in Theia AI

👉 Theia AI Change Sets: Managing Complex AI Change Suggestions

👉 Beyond AI Chat Agents with Theia AI

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