It's Released: Your Native Claude Code IDE Integration in Theia

Anthropic’s Claude Code is one of the most advanced AI coding agents available: powerful, autonomous, and loaded with well-designed tools. But until now, the experience always felt somewhat separated when used in combination with a visual IDE. The AI power lived in terminals, while our daily coding happened in the IDEs. Today, that changes.

We’re excited to announce the first open-source, native Claude Code IDE integration available now in the Theia IDE. This release delivers deep, high-end AI-in-the-IDE experience, combining Claude Code’s capabilities with the customizability and openness of Theia. See an in-depth demo in our latest YouTube video.

Why Bring Claude Code Natively to Theia?

Visual IDEs streamline the work in big projects, offer intuitive code navigation, and integrate perfectly with build tools, versioning systems, languages servers, and debuggers. But AI support in these tools often lags behind the latest state of the art provided by CLI tools like Claude Code, limited mostly to wrappers or extensions with little true IDE awareness and integration.

With this release of the first native Claude Code IDE integration, our goal is to merge:

• The truly native AI IDE experience of Cursor IDE or Github Copilot with
• the impressive, autonomous AI agent capabilities of Claude Code,
• within the rich, extensible, and open-source visual development environment Theia IDE provides.

How To Get Started

Getting set up is easy:

1. Install Claude Code:

   npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
   

2. Download Theia IDE:
   Visit theia-ide.org and grab the desktop version for your OS.

3. Enable AI Features:
   Launch Theia IDE (v1.65+). In the Chat view, open settings and enable AI features.

4. Add Your Anthropic API Key:
   Supply your API key in the settings or as the ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable.

5. Start Coding with Claude Code:
   Head to the Chat view, type @ClaudeCode and you’re talking to Claude Code inside your IDE!

Integration Highlights

What makes this integration stand out from terminal wrappers and basic Claude Code integrations?

• Context-Aware AI:
  Claude Code now has deep awareness of your IDE’s current context. Open files, editor selections, and even drag-and-drop actions feed directly into the prompt.

• Seamless Chat Sessions:
  Create, switch, and review chat sessions natively, without feeling the glitches of webviews that “just happen to run in your IDE window”.

• Effortless Code Edits & Diffs:
  All changes made by Claude Code are tracked and presented for review in the IDE’s native diff editor.

• Slash Commands & Autocomplete:
  Use / for Claude Code commands, like /clear or /resume, and see custom commands in available workspace autocomplete.

• Inline & Contextual AI:
  Select code and start inline AI sessions directly from within the native code editors, ask for explanations, or fix errors by right-clicking or using inline menus.

• Integrated Terminal Assistance:
  Stuck on a tricky terminal command? Hit Ctrl+I in the Theia terminal, describe your goal, and let Claude generate and paste the shell command for you.

• Extendable Agent Ecosystem:
  Claude Code is just one agent in a framework. You can combine multiple agents, configure workflows, and tailor AI help to your domain and projects.

Workflow Superpowers: Multi-Agent Collaboration

Beyond single-agent assistance, this integration enables designing sophisticated AI workflows with Theia AI’s extensible multi-agent system. Create your own custom AI agents and combine them seamlessly with the powers of Claude Code: let your custom agents gather relevant context or even interact with the application under development via MCP, and delegate to Claude Code when you need an autonomous coding agent to take over.

100% Open Source & Ready for Your To Extend and Enhance

Theia IDE and the Claude Code integration is open source, right from day one. Access the code, docs, and installation details via at the Theia website. Try it out, build with it, extend it — and let us know what’s most important to you in future versions!

We’re eager to hear:

• Which features should we tackle next?
• What IDE capabilities and states should be made available to Claude Code?
• Are there specific integrations or AI-powered workflows you wish for?

Drop your thoughts in the comments of YouTube video or reach out to us directly.

And, the Theia project is welcoming any contributors, whether it is bug reports, fixes, or new features. Feel free to reach out on Github and become part of the active community!

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• Services for Building AI-enhanced Tools and IDEs
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• Contact us to discuss your next project.

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