AI is changing custom tool and IDE development far beyond simply adding an assistant, from designing for AI agents to rethinking UX, architecture, prototyping, and team skills. This updated guide summarizes the key decisions to consider when building modern tools and IDEs in 2026 and is worth a read if you are planning a new tool or evolving an existing one.
Eclipse Theia 1.75 adds major new AI capabilities including Agent Plugins, agent Memory, and MCP Apps with interactive UI directly in chat. The release also brings a unified AI configuration experience, SCM improvements, faster startup, updated platform technologies, and dozens of additional enhancements - well worth a look at the full release notes.
Eclipse Theia 1.74 introduces 60 improvements, including a new AI First perspective, enhanced AI session management, per-session model selection, a telemerty framework and server-side compaction for long-running AI interactions. Check out the release overview to discover what’s new for users, adopters, and developers.
Eclipse Theia 1.73 is now available and introduces a strong set of new features, including AI Registry integration for easily discovering and installing MCP servers and skills. The release also adds provider-native server-side tools, Mermaid diagrams in AI chat, OAuth 2.1 support for remote MCP servers, and many additional platform improvements.
Eclipse Theia’s OCX26 project update highlights a year of strong momentum across the platform, Theia AI, and the Theia IDE, including around 1,200 merged PRs, close to 80 contributors, and a Codie 2025 Award. Watch the recap to learn how Theia is evolving for custom tools, AI-native IDEs, and Eclipse RCP modernization.
Building production-ready domain-specific AI takes more than a great demo. This talk from OCX 2026 shares 10 practical lessons from real-world projects, covering design, evaluation, context management, agentic workflows, and operational readiness.
Eclipse Theia 1.72 delivers faster builds with esbuild, improved AI agent workflows, safer tool confirmations, and better VS Code extension compatibility. Read the release notes to see what changed across Theia, Theia AI, the Theia IDE, devcontainers, and the workbench.
See Theia AI and Theia IDE in a 40-minute all-live OCX26 demo featuring agents, capabilities, MCP, sub-agents, skills, custom workflows, AI-assisted code review, and more. The recording is a practical look at how AI-native features can be integrated into custom tools and domain-specific IDEs.
Eclipse Theia 1.71 delivers 79 improvements across SCM, Theia AI, Dev Containers, testing, and core platform capabilities. Read the announcement to learn about the new SCM History Graph, Workspace Trust for AI, reasoning controls, token usage warnings, and the new PR Reviewer Agent for AI-assisted code reviews.
AI coding agents are helping developers produce more code than ever, but that also makes code review a growing bottleneck.
We therefore introduce the PR Reviewer agent in the Theia IDE: an AI-assisted code review workflow that supports human reviewers instead of replacing them. The agent helps with tedious review tasks such as preparing the workspace, navigating changes, drafting findings, and posting comments, while the reviewer stays in control of the final outcome.
