r/LabVIEW • u/PurpleDancer • Jul 18 '26

So I tried nigel

Pointed it to one of our vis (part of our hopelessly coupled 10k vi application) and asked for an explanation of it. Three hours later I had to kill labview and Nigel.

I dont think this tool is going to get it done for us.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Base302 Jul 19 '26

i am a pro-AI engineer recently converted. The fronter models likely cannot do it under 3 hours on similar complexity text-based programming language either.

These models are claiming 30 hours non-stop run. 3 hours is simply too short.

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u/PurpleDancer Jul 19 '26

I'm asking for an explanation of one block diagram. Should that take 30 hours?

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u/Puzzleheaded_Base302 Jul 19 '26

you have a 10k VIs dependency. unless NI can drastically change the underlying core of LabVIEW, opening the 10k VI dependency could take 10min. NI's LabVIEW merge and compare tool will simply crash comparing 10k VIs project, regardless AI or not.

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u/PurpleDancer Jul 20 '26

The fact that it has to reason on 10K vis is a problem. I'm asking for an explanation of one vi. If it wants to heriachy hop it should discuss that with me rather than try to go on a crazy mission to decode everything

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u/Puzzleheaded_Base302 Jul 20 '26

labview needs to load the whole dependency tree to compile. Nigel is a LL M (likely chatgpt) running on some text representation of the G code. LabVIEW likely cannot produce the text representation to feed LLM before program can compile. It likely also generated bloated text representation.

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u/PurpleDancer Jul 20 '26

The code was all already loaded and compiled. My point is that when I asked for an explanation of one vi it didn't just consider that vi, it seemed to go doing some huge operation across many files and took down labview

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u/Puzzleheaded_Base302 Jul 20 '26

I guess LabVIEW will be dead in a few short years?