Thomas Froment, Program Manager for Development Tools at the Eclipse Foundation, talks about how AI-native, vendor-neutral tooling is transforming the way IoT and LoRaWAN developers build, test, and ship products.

In this episode, he explains what Eclipse Theia is, why it matters, and how open-source toolchains give companies more control, privacy, and long-term resilience than proprietary AI editors. Drawing from his experience leading Theia, Open VSX, and other Eclipse development-tool initiatives, Thomas breaks down the rapidly evolving AI workflow landscape and why embedded engineers should pay attention.

• What Eclipse Theia actually is: a framework for building fully customizable, AI-native development environments designed for embedded and IoT toolchains
• How Theia differs from VS Code and Cursor, including privacy, extensibility, transparency, and the ability to integrate hardware, local workflows, and cloud systems in a single toolchain
• Why open-source governance and vendor independence matter for companies developing IoT devices, especially in regulated or security-sensitive environments
• The explosive growth of Open VSX and the shift toward extension ecosystems not controlled by a single vendor
• The role of Model Context Protocol, AI agents, and domain-specific prompting as organizations integrate AI deeply into engineering and testing workflows
• How teams use Theia to build hybrid local-plus-cloud development environments that support hardware-in-the-loop testing, device constraints, and long-tail IoT edge cases
• Emerging use cases for lightweight and local AI models inside IoT products, and why customization of prompts and agent behavior becomes essential
• Collaboration tooling within the Theia ecosystem, enabling real-time co-editing, code reviews, and multi-developer workflows for embedded teams
• Why IoT and LoRaWAN companies need to think in terms of entire toolchains rather than just IDEs, and how open-source components allow a tailored pipeline from development through testing and deployment

Guest Links:

• LinkedIn
• Eclipse Foundation