Development platform: Theia 1.60 puts AI prompts under MIT license

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The EclipseSource team has released version 1.60 for Eclipse Theia. Over the past month, 100 pull requests have been incorporated into the update of the open source platform, which is used to create development environments and tools for the web and desktop. One of the key changes is the migration from the PhosphorJS framework to Lumino, a framework for widgets and layout that is also maintained by the JupyterLab community.

Extended AI functions

The update includes extended support for Google AI as an LLM provider, which should enable more stable use of the Gemini family models. In addition, version 1.60 introduces a feature that allows Theia AI agents to retrieve diagnostics in files to identify problems more efficiently.

Version 1.60 offers experimental features such as chat-specific query settings and the so-called Thinking Mode, a kind of thinking mode for the AI model Claude, which enables more detailed AI responses. With the introduction of prompt fragments, reusable parts of prompts can be defined, which should increase flexibility in the use of AI-based functions.

AI prompts under MIT license

In Theia 1.60, the development team has moved all prompt templates in Theia AI and the AI-powered Theia IDE to individual files and placed them under the MIT license. This change prevents licensing complications and should give users and tool developers the freedom to customize prompts in their applications without having to return their changes.

Optimized management of MCP servers

In the new Theia release, the development team has introduced a configuration view for MCP servers (Model Control Protocol) within the AI configuration view. This view is designed to give users a clearer overview of the MCP server landscape and its current status by listing all configured MCP server settings and displaying the server status in clearly defined states such as Running, Starting, Errored or Not Running.

In addition to the status information, the view shows all tools that are connected to each server. Users can copy and paste these tools into chat-based interfaces or prompt templates. They can choose to copy a combined prompt fragment, a list of all available tools or individual tools. Users can also start or stop individual MCP servers directly from the interface.

Further information on Theia 1.60 can be found in the announcement post on the Eclipse source blog.

(mdo)