A lot has changed in developer tooling in just one year.
When we opened the Call for Proposals for TheiaCon 2025, AI assistants were already reshaping the developer experience, and the transition towards more agentic workflows was beginning.
Twelve months later, that transition is much harder to ignore.
Agents can explore repositories, modify code, invoke tools, run commands and tests, analyse failures, and iterate on increasingly complex engineering tasks.
And something particularly interesting is happening: writing code no longer necessarily means sitting in front of an editor.
Development workflows are spreading across IDEs, terminals, browsers, remote environments, CI systems, agent runtimes and background processes.
Does that make the IDE obsolete? I don't know. But it does challenge our assumptions about what an IDE is, where its boundaries are, and ultimately what a modern software development tool should become.
This is also the context in which Eclipse Theia (https://theia-ide.org) has been evolving and particularly Theia AI.
Theia AI is not another AI coding assistant or chatbot embedded into an IDE. It is an open source framework for software tool builders to create their own AI-native tools and developer experiences. It provides building blocks for integrating models, agents, tools, context and user interactions, while allowing tool builders to retain control over how those components are assembled and which technologies they use underneath.
As AI becomes part of the architecture of software tools rather than simply a feature of the user interface, we also need to think about secure agent execution, observability, interoperability, model choice, extension ecosystems and governance.
The conversation is becoming much bigger than the IDE.
And that is precisely why I think TheiaCon 2026 comes at such an interesting moment.
📢 The Call for Proposals is open until 15 September.
👉 Submit your proposal: https://www.eclipse.org/events/2026/theiacon/cfp/
Whether you have a production story, an AI-native experiment, a technical deep dive, a demo, an architecture worth discussing, or lessons from something that did not work as expected, bring it to TheiaCon 2026.
A Growing Ecosystem, and a Broader Conversation
There is now a substantial body of real-world experience to discuss.
Eclipse Theia is being used by a growing and diverse ecosystem to build production tools across embedded development, semiconductors, industrial engineering, cloud development and many other specialised domains.
And the ecosystem keeps growing:
You can find adopter stories, use cases and more from the Eclipse developer tools ecosystem: https://www.eclipse.org/topics/ide/
But TheiaCon 2026 is deliberately broader.
We want to hear from software tool builders.
If you are building with Eclipse Theia, experimenting with Theia AI, developing agentic workflows, working on AI infrastructure, using complementary technologies, or exploring these challenges with a completely different stack, your experience can contribute to the conversation.
Because many of the patterns for AI-native software tooling are still being defined.
How should agents interact with tools and context? How do we execute them safely? How do we maintain interoperability and model choice? How do organisations retain control over their development environments, code and data?
These are increasingly shared engineering challenges for software tool builders.
And TheiaCon is where we want to compare approaches and learn from each other.
Bring What You Are Building
TheiaCon 2026 is looking for real engineering experiences: adopter stories, architectures, AI-native workflows, technical deep dives, AI infrastructure, demos, prototypes, experiments, and lessons learned.
You do not need a polished success story.
Something you tried that did not work as expected can be just as valuable as something running successfully in production.
You may have years of experience, or an experiment you started a few weeks ago.
This year's CFP includes topics such as adopter stories, building tools and IDEs, AI-powered developer experiences, AI infrastructure for software tool builders, technical deep dives, demos, platform evolution and complementary technologies such as Eclipse Open VSX.
It also opens the conversation to emerging infrastructure such as Eclipse Enclave, providing secure, isolated runtimes for autonomous AI agents.
Full talks, lightning talks and panels are all welcome.
Bring your use case. Bring your architecture. Bring your experiment. Bring what worked, and what did not.
TheiaCon 2026 is an opportunity to bring software tool builders together while the foundations of AI-native software tooling are still being shaped.
📢 The TheiaCon 2026 CFP closes on 15 September, learn more about TheiaCon 2026 at https://www.eclipse.org/events/2026/theiacon/
The next generation of AI-native software tools is already being built. Let's share what we are learning and build stronger open foundations together.
