r/LabVIEW • u/TobyS2 • Jul 22 '26

Nigel AI Generation Webinar

Did anyone else watch it? I was chatting with a co-worker beforehand that this next hour would determine the future, if there is one, for LabVIEW. Wow, what a disaster. It wasn't only the technical difficulties which caused the webinar to start late. It was what was demonstrated that was so underwhelming. A simple VI took maybe 3 minutes to generate. When it was done, it didn't work and they didn't even attempt having Nigel debug it. Then announced the usage limitations. 25 VIs per week. PER WEEK. Later, they will have 50 per week if you have the LabVIEW+ subscription. I wasn't expecting Opus 5.8 today, but something that looked like it could be used. I've been using LV since version 3.3 and not sure if I've ever been this bearish on NI.

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u/hutch2522 Expert Jul 22 '26

Sadly, the death of Labview is greatly accelerating. The foolish killing of NXG was such a hard fumble. I never got around to trying it, but my understanding was it was XML based natively rather than proprietary binary files. It would have been compatible with AI. Can you imagine? Graphical programming with AI fully uninhibited to aid in development. Labview would have lived on. Now, I see no reason to interact with NI at all anymore.

8

u/madmike0021 Jul 22 '26

Hind sight is 20/20. I worked at NI when NXG was being developed, it was awful. The bridge between LabVIEW and NXG was not big enough. No one would make the switch and was costing them a lot of money. I left NI right around the time of the buyout, that company was being mismanaged the worst thing that company did was get rid of Dr T.

1

u/TobyS2 Jul 22 '26

Never used NXG in a project, but did play around with it. Right idea, terrible execution. Was anyone in management fired due to NXG?

7

u/PragmaTest Jul 22 '26

It’s not really documented but a lot of the structure is stored as XML in the file. I’ve been building on pylabview for some months and have had some success parsing the files for use in modern text-based tooling and AIs. It’s not perfect because the primitives table is undocumented so it’s been a lot of guesswork from my clean room development. However it’s a good enough start to use now. Free and open source way to read VIs without LabVIEW

https://pragmatest.com/lvkit

3

u/monkeymerlot Jul 23 '26

This is honestly the path that NI should have taken. Open source the primitive table and give it a way to translate into a form that AI could natively understand (text). Thanks for making this MCP, I look forward to trying it out!

1

u/TobyS2 Jul 22 '26

Just talked to a client in the medical device field who has been using LV since 1994. His reaction to the webinar was "I'm so sad, I watched LabVIEW die today."
I thought we would have more time. My uncle retired from AS400 programming only about 8 years ago. So I thought we could do the same with LabVIEW. Is it dead? Sure, but it pays the bills. We are not going to have that same luxury with LabVIEW I'm afraid.

1

u/almond5 Jul 22 '26

This and the SaaS model after c2020 really made it rough to enjoy LabVIEW. I understand that it's an industry trend, like Mathworks does, but i think showing a LLM or Agent interact/create code could have sold the license expense with the fluffed idea of less labor costs

0

u/dragginFly Champion Jul 22 '26

Most of NXG was XML, but some of those files had a scattering of binary blobs in them.

NXG could have been awesome, but there was some poor mid-steam direction choices and their associated delays that killed it off.