A Native Claude Code IDE? How It Could Look Like with Eclipse Theia

What if Claude Code, Anthropic’s powerful AI coding agent, wasn’t just a terminal app but a truly native part of your IDE?

That’s the question we explored in our latest side project at EclipseSource. The result: a native Claude Code integration in the Theia IDE platform, designed to deliver a deeply connected experience for developers working with AI.

Why We Built It

Claude Code is impressive. It brings well-designed tools, clever prompting, and impressive coding results. But it’s a terminal application, which is great for terminal fans, pipelines, scripts, and CI, but not ideal when working on larger projects in a modern visual IDE.

Yes, there is a VS Code extension – but it’s mostly a terminal wrapper. It lacks real integration, not because of Claude Code itself but because the VS Code extension API limits what’s possible.

So we turned to Eclipse Theia, an open-source and vendor-neutral IDE framework. It lets you customize anything. With this Theia-based proof-of-concept tool we wanted to explore what it would feel like if Claude Code were truly part of your IDE instead of just an add-on?

What the Prototype Offers

Here’s what we’ve built so far:

• Native Chat Sessions: Start and switch between Claude Code sessions directly in the IDE.
• Edits & Diffs: Changes made by Claude Code are grouped into change sets for convenient review directly in your IDE.
• Drag & Drop Context: Drop files into a session to give Claude more context, or rely on editors you’ve opened in your IDE.
• Tool Renderers: Rich and interactive UI views for Claude responses, such as file reads, Claude’s todos, edits, and more.
• Initiate Chats from the Code Editor: Start a sessions inline directly from your editor to get suggestions or quick fixes.
• Terminal Integration: Claude can also help directly in the terminal by generating commands on the fly.

We Want Your Feedback

This is a small side project, not a product yet. It’s something we built in just a few days to explore how it would feel like.

But now we’d love to hear from you:

👉 Should we continue building this?
👉 Should we make it open source?
👉 What features would you like to see?
👉 What would be a good name for this project?

💬 Leave your thoughts in the comments on YouTube and help us decide where to take it next.

Want to Build Something Similar?

This prototype builds on our experience with AI-native tools. If you’re exploring similar ideas—like integrating Claude Code, or other agents into IDEs or engineering tools, we’re here to help.

👉 Services for Building AI-enhanced Tools and IDEs
👉 Support for AI-Native Software Engineering
👉 Contact us to discuss your project

Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow EclipseSource on LinkedIn to stay up to date with how this project continues.