Who Controls Your Agents? Building Vendor-Neutral Infrastructure for Agentic Developer Tools

Agentic AI is rapidly transforming developer tooling, shifting from passive assistants to autonomous agents capable of acting across the software lifecycle. Yet many of these systems, while marketed as open, still depend on single-vendor governance, proprietary extension ecosystems, and opaque AI integrations.
This creates a structural risk: as agents become more capable, organisations may lose control not only over their tools, but over the behaviour, data flows, and decision-making processes embedded in their development environments.
This session presents a practical alternative built within the Eclipse Foundation, a non profit organisation headquartered in Brussels and a long-standing European leader in open source ecosystems. Its governance model enables vendor-neutral collaboration and long-term sustainability, which becomes critical in an agent-driven world.
We introduce two complementary building blocks for agentic developer tooling:
- Theia AI, an open source framework to build and operate agentic capabilities within developer tools, enabling multi-LLM orchestration, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, and full control over model selection, execution patterns, and data boundaries.
- Open VSX, an open source extension registry compatible with the VS Code ecosystem, enabling transparent distribution of agent integrations, curated marketplaces, and independence from vendor-controlled platforms
Open VSX has become critical infrastructure for the fast-growing ecosystem of VS Code forks and AI-first environments, reaching over 300 million extension downloads per month and supporting major tools such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity and other agent-enabled development environments.
Together, Theia AI and Open VSX provide a reusable, vendor-neutral foundation for building and governing agentic developer systems. The session includes a live demonstration of an agent-enabled developer environment, showing how organisations can retain control over agents, extensions, and data flows in practice.