The Eclipse Foundation today made available an alpha release of an instance of its open source Theia integrated development environment (IDE), that provides access to artificial intelligence (AI) agents that will automate a wide range of coding tasks on behalf of application developers.
At the same time, the consortium is making generally available the framework that IDE is built on to any organization that wants to build its own AI-infused IDE.
Contributed to the consortium by EclipseSource, a provider of a framework for building IDEs, the AI-Powered Theia IDE provides access to coding agents that application developers can expose to any large language model (LLM) they prefer.
The edition of the Theia IDE promises to make it possible for application developers to be able to orchestrate the entire prompt engineering flow, define agentic AI behaviors, and determine which data and knowledge sources are used, as they continuously fine-tune interactions with LLMs, including creating interactive chat interfaces, integrating AI into code editors, or crafting fully customized user interface (UI) elements.
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that approach prevents organizations from having to worry about becoming locked into proprietary LLMs at a time when the pace of generative AI innovation is only going to continue to accelerate.
Application developers will be able to invoke agents capable of mix and match LLMs based on the current capabilities provided, rather than always being dependent on how advanced a specific LLM might be at any given time, he added.
Additionally, a Model Contextual Protocol (MCP)makes it possible to connect AI-driven workflows with external tools, services and other data sources to facilitate interoperability.
Integration with SCANOSS tools will also enable developers to analyze the code they create using AI tools, to ensure it complies with open-source licensing policies.
Once the AI-Powered Theia IDE becomes generally available, the AI coding equation will be fundamentally changed, said Milinkovich. In addition to greatly expanding the number of IDEs with AI capabilities that might be made available by multiple vendors, some DevOps teams might opt to build their own IDE based on open-source code, he noted. There will be little reason to rely on proprietary IDEs, most of which are forks of the open source VS Code IDE, to invoke AI agents, said Milinkovich.
The Theia IDE being built by the Eclipse Foundation is yet another example of how the open source community is quickly closing an AI gap with providers, or proprietary tools and platforms. History is a guide that over time the pace of innovation occurring in the open-source community will soon surpass the ability of any one vendor to keep pace, said Milinkovich.
The challenge and the opportunity now is to foster the next wave of application development by getting AI coding tools into the hands of as many application developers as possible at the lowest cost possible. Once that occurs, the onus will be on providers of LLMs to keep pace with the needs of those developers versus always forcing them to be dependent on the capabilities a single vendor decides when to make available.
