Claude and pvxplus

[martinp]

I started using claude for programming and I am blown away... Seriously I think we may never code again LOL.

I am surprised how well Claude is getting to write pvxplus stuff and when it's confused I cut/paste some documentation and boom it cleans it up. 

Not sure if you have considered using it but it's fantastic, even if just for planning projects. 

Can feed claude a bunch of data dictionary structures, to train your session.

I even gave it some 30 year old legacy code to clean up and it helped do that..

It's unbelievable with excel/csv/pdf's... I now started having it make python routines that can be run on the local server then integrated with pvxplus.

I havent tried it to make nomads panels dont think it can maybe if it reverse engineered the structures of some existing panels..

Just now I was finishing a project outline, after completing the data dictionaries (it made the tables based on our outlines) it asked me, so do you want me to work on the import program next?  I said yes, and within seconds I had a working program...

Anyway just wanted to show and tell, LOL

[John Spencer]

I too have used an AI tool - CHatGPT at the moment - with PxPlus development. It really is quite amazing. I fed it code from a 40 year old BB system and it returned a full list of DFD's in no time...

[martinp]

Yeah that's another good use for it.

Just over weekend I had it develop an entire payroll vacation accrual system that imports data from Dayforce.  It's not able to make nomads panels but it gave me a concept drawing which it understood how nomads panels work and just made each called routine perfectly.

- Helped develop the pvxplus data structure for the entire project
- Created an import routine to extract data from PDF reports
- Created modularized pvxplus calls to each routine
- Created a front end to view the data / edit entries
- Export to pvxplus excel object  (I just gave it the docs for *obj/excel)

What would have taken weeks was done in 2 days.  Not to mention just the PDF extraction tool it wrote in python for our linux server.. So that now runs free on the clients server.

Each pvxplus line of code was done by it and after a few corrections ie (X++ not LET X++, and passing params into "process" request as strings ) it knew what it was doing so well.

It knows to modularize everything so it uses calls and I just had to teach it to pass parameters as strings to the process for the panels, for some of the child windows but I am not kidding it knew everything and how thorough it checks it work is mind blowing.

I think the future of coding will be more of a "director/manager/conductor?" this proved it to me 100%

[Stéphane Devouard]

Martin

NOMADS panels can be imported/exported from/to text files with an INI-like structure. That's how the PxPlus SVN interface handles libraries and panels (creating folders for libraries and individual .pxpnl text files for library objects)

So you could maybe train Claude to create those .pxpnl files

[Aaron Woodhouse]

There will actually be a presentation about using AI and specifically Claude Code with PxPlus at DireXions 2026!

I don't want to say too much, but I definitely think you'll get some useful things from attending that'll help with your own development, even if you've already been using Claude like this 

[martinp]

Awesome this is so exciting..

Hah I've become a copy paste and middle man conductor at the moment

PS.  Stephane yeah good idea!

[martinp]

This never ends,

I integrated claude to our linux server and it made its own system to convert text to pvxplus was hilarious how fast it figured it out, after it did that I said wait we already do this with our existing SVN routine, and it then saw how it worked, saw it uses the *plus/proj/pxprg and it really liked that, then later it saw pxp has the "pxpnl" routine which builds panels from text and it basically suddenly knew how to make panels...

This was all it took for it to learn how to make them, it may have also looked at at my repository of test panels already from the repository, not sure.

"Build panel export/import/merge tools for NOMADS libraries, using *plus/proj/pxpnl to_cvs/to_app, following the same safety rules as the program tools (to_app only on a copy, re-export and  compare, backup, atomic rename). Test the full round trip on a scratch copy of a small library first. Nothing touches /artcraft until I approve."

After With this simple prompt:

"create a test library with 4 buttons two listboxes some multilines and just a sample program, read a data file just to populate the listbox using the data file "/artcraft/1/data/mcempl"  the second listbox can just be random numbers loaded with a test button"

It came up with this test panel, all by itself, incredible.  It even learned how I wrote some of the pre/post stuff all by itself.. 

I imagine you could even go the other way, have it read through pvx panels/code and build you an entire system like in web or some other language... Shock and awe..

More reading into this I see developers are not even using IDE's anymore, everything is terminal driven... 

[martinp]

oops added 2nd msg by mistake