TheiaCon 2025: The Eclipse Theia Project Update

We’re excited to share the opening keynote from TheiaCon 2025, providing a comprehensive update on the Eclipse Theia project over the past year. This keynote highlights the remarkable progress Theia has made as an AI-native, vendor-neutral IDE platform and IDE.

The Eclipse Theia Project Update 2025

The past year has been the most active in Theia’s history, with over 1,167 pull requests merged—more than three per day! The project has advanced rapidly with monthly releases and a growing, vibrant community. If you want to stay updated on everything happening in the Theia ecosystem, this keynote provides the perfect overview.

Key Highlights from the Past Year

The keynote covers several major milestones and achievements:

• Recent Recognition: Theia AI won the prestigious 2025 Codie Award for “Best Open Source Development Tool”
• Theia AI Stability: The AI framework reached general availability in March 2025
• MCP Integration: One of the first tools to support the Model Control Protocol, with continuous enhancements
• The Coder Agent: Early 2024: Release and improvements of Theia’s open and flexible AI coding assistant
• Architectural Work: Migration from PhosphorJS to Lumino for improved maintainability
• Agent Capabilities: Advanced features like task context, project info, and agent mode
• Cloud Code Integration: Native environment support for this popular AI coding agent

What is Theia?

For those new to the project, the keynote provides a concise introduction to the four components of the Theia ecosystem:

1. Theia Platform: A technology for building tools and IDEs
2. Theia IDE: A flexible, open IDE built on the platform
3. Theia AI: A framework for building AI-native tools and IDEs
4. AI-native Theia IDE: The end-user IDE enhanced with innovative, open and flexible AI features

Learn more in our updated Theia FAQ.

Theia AI: UI and Agent Framework

The keynote details the extensive improvements to Theia AI over one year, which includes:

• Rich UI Components: Chat with follow-up suggestions, image support, structured questions, and change sets
• Agent Management: Flexible creation of agents, agent-to-agent delegation, and tool functions
• Prompt Management: Support for prompt variants, fragments, and workspace-specific prompts
• Universal LLM Support: Compatibility with numerous providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google AI, Ollama, Mistral, and Deepseek

Learn more: https://theia-ide.org/theia-ai/

Platform Improvements

The project hasn’t just focused on new features but has also invested significantly in platform stability and architecture:

• Migration to NPM: Moving away from Yarn to embrace industry standards
• Lumino Migration: Replacing the deprecated PhosphorJS with the actively maintained Lumino
• Backend Preference Support: Enabling access to user preferences on the backend
• Frontend-less Mode: Enhanced capabilities for running Theia without a backend
• Improved Debugging: Ongoing contributions to enhance debugging capabilities

Community and Adoption

The Theia community continues to grow with:

• Increased user base for the Theia IDE
• Continuous monthly releases
• Complete VS Code extension API support
• Expanded documentation
• A diverse and stable community providing an efficient open source collaboration
• A growing list of adopters across various industries

See also our recent post about Theia’s growing list of adopters.

Supporting the Theia Ecosystem

The keynote concludes with ways to get involved and support the project:

• Showcase your Theia-based tools
• Engage with the community through regular calls
• Contribute through bug reports, feature requests, or code contributions
• Support and sponsor the project, either through individual contracts or via Open Collective

Looking Forward

As Theia continues to evolve, AI capabilities remain at the forefront of innovation in the ecosystem. The project’s commitment to openness, flexibility, and user control positions it as a compelling alternative to proprietary development environments.

For more information about TheiaCon 2025 and other sessions, visit the Theia website.

If you are interested in building custom (AI-powered) IDEs, tools or migrating existing desktop tools, EclipseSource provides consulting and implementation services. We specifically specialize in AI-powered tools and support for popular platforms like Eclipse Theia and VS Code.

Additionally, we offer consulting and support for hosting web-based tools in the cloud.

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