CNX Adds AI To Valence Development Tool
May 18, 2026 Alex Woodie
CNX is adding a new AI assistant to Valence, its no-code development environment for IBM i. The AI will provide a range of enhancements to the Valence experience, from helping with modernizing existing greenscreen applications to providing the ability for executives to “chat” with their Db2 for i data.
Valence is a collection of tools for creating new Web and mobile applications that run on IBM i. The software features RPG procedures for integrating with existing IBM i logic, and generates JavaScript front-ends that are served by IBM i’s native HTTP Server (the one powered by Apache). Popular add-ons include the Nitro App Builder, which provides no-code development functionality, along with a Web portal for administration, a spool file viewer, and a file editor, among others.
With the launch of Valence 6.4 at the recent COMMON POWERUp conference, you can add a couple more, including the Valence Assistant and Data Chat Widget.
Valence Assistant
Valence Assistant will handle several tasks for users, from analyzing existing code to generating finished Valence applications, with all the requisite RPG, SQL, and JavaScript. Customers simply explain to Valence Assistant what they want to develop through a prompt, and the assistant will generate it for them.
“It’s going to be dramatically faster for anyone, especially someone that’s daunted by the prospect of creating an application,” says Robert Swanson, a co-founder and software engineer at CNX, which was bought by Izzi Software back in February 2025. “This really holds your hand through that process.”
CNX developed the Nitro App Builder as no-code tool, so it had already lowered the technical know-how required to be productive with Valence, although knowledge of the database has always been helpful. With the addition of the Valence Assistant, the minimum level of knowledge of the Valence toolset has gone down even more, which CNX hopes will help to fill the IBM i skills gap.
“They don’t have to understand the tool,” Swanson said. “They just need to describe what they want, and it will actually configure the application for them, including backend logic.”
The addition of Valence Assistant will make the product more practical for application modernization projects, which it previously had shied away from.
“We kept getting hit all the time with ‘We’ve got these existing things we want to convert,’ and our response was always, ‘Well, you need to inspect what the program does and basically rewrite it,’” Swanson said. “That usually didn’t appeal as much as being able to say ‘We’ve got a silver bullet,’ like a screen scraper. But we hate screen scrapers. The results are always clunky and don’t do justice to the platform. So we finally have an answer to that.”
During POWERUp, CNX demonstrated how Valence Assistant could help with an application modernization project. The AI tool analyzed the code for the old RPG-based maintenance application and associated display files, then re-wrote the business logic in free-format RPG along with the ExtJS front-end. It even offered users with options on how to improve it.
“It’s on rails so that it writes in a certain structure that’s very familiar to someone that’s working with an application in this context,” Swanson said. “It’s very easy to modify and understand what it’s doing because there’s no fixed form, no D specs or any of that sort of stuff.”
The goal is to give junior developers who might not be familiar with the IBM i and RPG a power tool that they can lean on and become productive in a shorter amount of time, Swanson said.
“This is addressing the skills gap and helping with a lot of new newbies coming into the platform that don’t have any RPG skills or certainly don’t know what fixed-form RPG is,” he said. “It addresses a major pain point for developers that are tasked with trying to modernize existing green screen applications, but they don’t want to deliver something that’s just a green screen with lipstick on it.”
Data Chat Widget
The new Data Chat Widget, meanwhile, is designed to let executives or other decision-makers quickly get access to specific data points without requiring the time or effort of a developer to build a custom report to query the Db2 for i database.
Valence 6.4 lets you ask questions of your database.
“It’s just really a neat way for people to get what they want without having to wait for it to deliver a specific application that does what they’re looking for,” Swanson said. “Everything is automatically downloadable to PDF or Excel or CSV or JSON or XML.”
The one caveat with Data Chat Widget is that it assumes the database is laid out in an intuitive manner, with field names that make sense. That’s not always the case, as many IBM i servers still have cryptic field names, perhaps that are leftover of the limited storage of bygone years.
“I would say a good prerequisite to this is making sure your database is well defined so that there’s no ambiguity in what a column is used for,” Swanson said. “Some places do some really creative, nasty stuff with their databases, and that’s always going to be a challenge no matter what tool you use.”
Both the Data Chat Widget and the Valence Assistant are accessible through the new VS Code plug-in that CNX has developed. Users can now get access to Valence capabilities through VS Code, which has become the defacto standard tool for application development in the IT world as well as with IBM i, thanks to the Code for i plug-in developed by Liam Allan.
Valence 6.4 works with multiple AI models. It automatically directs requests to one of a several large language models based on the accuracy requirements and cost constraints. It also handles all the prompting behind the scenes. CNX provides access to AI models for the user. For more information, see www.cnxcorp.com.
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