"AI coding tools face a fundamental challenge, there's no standard for tool calling across providers and models. Claude uses one schema, OpenAI another, and many models don't support native tool calling at all. This forces developers to maintain provider-specific integrations or limit themselves to a single vendor.
Virtual tool calling solves this by translating tool definitions into structured system messages that any model can understand—effectively simulating native tool support through prompt engineering. Instead of relying on provider-specific function calling APIs, we define tools in the system message and parse model responses for tool invocations. This means a single codebase can work seamlessly across Claude, GPT-5, local models, and everything in between.
Beyond the technical solution, this represents a broader shift in AI developer tools. VS Code locked features behind Copilot, creating a closed ecosystem. We're now seeing the industry move away from these walled gardens and I am excited to show how we can leverage these concepts beyond the IDE. This session covers both the implementation of virtual tool calling and why building in the open matters for the future of AI-native development."
Brian is the Head of DX at Continue, an open source platform to create, share, and use custom AI code assistants with our open-source IDE extensions and hub of rules, tools, and models. Brian previously founded Open Sauced where he woreds on increasing the knowledge and insights of open-source communities. In the past he’s lead Developer Advocacy at GitHub by fostering a community of early adopters through conversations with the top open source maintainers on GitHub.
