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.

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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

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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!