It is not every day that an open source developer tool receives recognition from outside its own ecosystem. This week, Eclipse Theia AI was awarded the 2025 CODiE Award for Best Open Source Development Tool, a distinction granted by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). For those unfamiliar, the CODiE Awards are among the longest standing peer-reviewed awards in the software industry, judged by a panel of domain experts, practitioners, analysts and educators. In short, these awards matter because they come from people who actually build, use and assess software.
For the Theia community, this is a meaningful milestone. It confirms something many of us already felt simply by watching adoption: this project is becoming one of the most exciting developments in the open source dev tooling landscape!
What this award represents for Eclipse Theia
AI assisted development has moved rapidly from experimentation to daily reality. Yet much of the tooling available today remains proprietary, opaque or tied to a single vendor. The result is a recurring set of questions for development teams: where does the code go, how is it used, and what mechanisms exist for oversight or customisation.
Theia AI addresses these challenges by providing a fully open and inspectable framework for building AI native IDEs. It is not a monolithic assistant but an extensible layer within the Eclipse Theia platform, with dedicated registries for language model providers, a flexible agent architecture, support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and a chat and completion system designed for clarity rather than abstraction. The architectural overview illustrates how each component, from the prompt editor to the agent dispatcher, remains visible, configurable and auditable.
For organisations that need to manage compliance and software supply chains, this openness is a practical requirement. For developers, it offers the reassurance that tools behave predictably and can be adapted rather than endured.
A thriving project shaped by its community
The CODiE recognition is above all a testament to the Theia community. Contributors, maintainers, adopters and tool builders have collectively shaped a platform that continues to grow in both capability and scale. Eclipse Theia now exceeds 21,000 GitHub stars and 2,700 forks, a clear sign of sustained interest and real world usage. By the way, if you want to know more about Theia Adopters, you should read https://www.eclipse.org/topics/ide/articles/the-active-ecosystem-of-eclipse-theia-adopters
If you are a developer and would like to explore the project or even contribute to something meaningful at scale, the source code and issue tracker are openly available on GitHub: https://github.com/eclipse-theia
This growth has also enabled rapid iteration on Theia AI itself. What began with a small set of agents has expanded into a rich ecosystem that includes universal and specialised chat agents, code completion, terminal integration and emerging orchestration capabilities. Theia AI is becoming a reliable reference for how AI can be integrated into professional grade development environments without locking users into rigid assumptions or commercial constraints.
Part of a larger movement in modern developer tooling
Theia AI’s progress is part of a broader shift. Developer expectations today are shaped by the rise of VS Code and the extraordinary dynamism of its extension ecosystem. That growth is increasingly mirrored in open infrastructure. Open VSX, the fully open extension registry hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, is now handling usage levels that reach several hundred million extension downloads per month. https://open-vsx.org
This adoption reflects a clear preference among many organisations: open ecosystems matter. They provide independence, transparent governance and a level of interoperability that proprietary solutions struggle to match. For these same reasons, open and community driven AI tooling is becoming a strategic requirement rather than a niche interest.
Teams that already choose Open VSX over proprietary marketplaces often have similar expectations when evaluating AI tooling: maintaining control over their development stack, understanding how AI components operate and relying on solutions that remain vendor neutral.
See Theia AI in action
The best introduction to Theia AI remains hands-on experience. The Eclipse Theia IDE, including its AI capabilities, can be downloaded from: https://theia-ide.org/
For those who prefer to see it demonstrated, there is also a recent end to end showcase recorded in the lead-up to the Eclipse Foundation’s Open Community Experience (OCX) conference taking place in Brussels in April 2026. The demo in this YouTube video offers a clear overview of the AI capabilities in context, including agents, model integrations and the overall developer workflow.
A shared achievement and a sign of what comes next
Theia AI’s CODiE Award reflects a growing recognition that openness, transparency and community governance are becoming essential in the era of AI assisted development. More than a feature set, Theia AI represents an approach to building tools and IDEs that developers can understand, extend and trust.
Congratulations and thanks go first to the Theia community for making this possible!
The award highlights what this ecosystem has already achieved and signals the opportunity ahead for those building the next generation of developer tools in the open.
