NX AI Test Questions: 6 Real User Asks to Score (2026)

NX AI Test Questions: The Short Version

NX AI test questions are real questions NX users ask, used as an acceptance test for an NX assistant. inteliScience, a Siemens NX, NXOpen and Teamcenter specialist delivering nearshore from Romania, scores them in three classes: documentation, method and action. Pass means correct version, exact command, company rule cited, or geometry built through a gated NXOpen call.

The Problem: Users Expect a Colleague, Vendors Demo a Chatbot

A DACH machine builder’s CAD administration recently collected what its NX users expect from an “NX AI”. The first six items were not requests for a chatbot. They were the questions users would otherwise walk over and ask a senior colleague:

How do I switch automatic constraint creation on or off in the old (legacy) sketch on a drawing?
How do I create a 3D part from a sketch and a sketch path (sweep along a path)?
Where and how do I attach the callout for a component change on the drawing?
How do I create stable, associative WAVE links?
How can broken WAVE links be repaired?
Design a keyway of type xy in this shaft.

Vendors demo something else: a fluent answer to a question the vendor chose, on a release the vendor chose, with no company standard in the room. The Siemens release cadence makes this worse. The June 2026 release (Designcenter 2606, announced 23 June 2026) renamed NX to Designcenter and shipped Designcenter Copilot, “grounded in Designcenter documentation and best practices” and, per Siemens’ AI page, powered by Microsoft Phi-3. The 2612 early access program ran from 31 August to 25 September 2026. Two releases a year means every command-path answer has a version attached, whether the assistant says so or not.

Our position: those six questions are a better acceptance test than any vendor questionnaire, because each fails a chatbot in a specific, checkable way. Three need the right NX version and exact command. Two need your modeling guideline. One needs an NXOpen call behind a gate.

What the Six NX AI Test Questions Actually Test

Grouping the questions makes scoring simpler, because each class fails differently: class 1 on version drift, class 2 on missing company rules, class 3 when the assistant writes geometry without asking or without a gate.

#	User question (paraphrased)	Class	What it really tests
1	Toggle automatic constraints in the legacy sketch on a drawing	Documentation	Version awareness, legacy vs current sketcher
2	Build a solid from a section sketch and a path sketch	Documentation	Exact command name, command vs neighbours
3	Attach the change callout on the drawing	Documentation + company rule	Drafting standard retrieval
4	Create stable, associative WAVE links	Method	Company modeling guideline cited
5	Repair broken WAVE links	Method	Command path plus company rule
6	Design keyway type xy in this shaft	Action	NXOpen execution, gate, missing parameters

We would use this classification unchanged for any NX assistant evaluation. The generic buyer’s framework, grounding layers and vendor criteria are in our engineering AI assistant evaluation; this article is the NX-specific half.

Class 1: Documentation Questions Need the Right NX Version and the Exact Command

A documentation question passes only when the answer names the release it applies to, the exact command or setting, and the environment the user is in. The three questions below look easy. Each has a trap a general chatbot walks into, and why ChatGPT gets Siemens NX wrong explains why.

Question 1: constraints in the legacy sketch

The word “old” is the whole test. NX has run two sketch environments since the new sketch solver arrived in NX 1926 in June 2020 (Saratech, 10 July 2026). Which one is active is controlled in File > Utilities > Early Access Features, and the toggle has been documented under two names: “Use the new solver and UI for sketching” in an NX 2007 write-up (PLM Tech Talk) and “Use the Classic Solver and UI for Sketching” in a 2021 write-up (Swoosh Technologies). Both note that the setting is stored per part and needs an NX restart.

The behaviour the user means is a pair of sketch settings, Create Inferred Constraints and Continuous Auto Dimensioning, with a customer default under Sketch > Inferred Constraints and Dimensions (Siemens Community).

What we could not verify from public sources is whether a sketch on a drawing sheet uses the legacy environment in the user’s release. A passing answer does not guess: it establishes release and environment, then quotes the toggle for that release. A failing answer gives one menu path with no version and no environment.

Question 2: solid from a section sketch and a path sketch

The command is Sweep along Guide: one section, one guide, under Home tab > Feature group > More > Sweep > Sweep along Guide (mechanicalengblog). The trap is the neighbour. Swept accepts more section and guide options and lets the section sit anywhere along the guide, whereas Sweep along Guide expects the section near the start of the guide (Siemens Community). “Use Swept” is not wrong, but it does not answer the question asked. A pass names Sweep along Guide, states the two inputs, and says when Swept fits better. A fail describes a generic “sweep” without a command name.

Question 3: the change callout on the drawing

Documentation on the surface, company rule underneath. NX ships no single “change callout” command that we could find. Community answers build the marker from a custom symbol inside a note (Siemens Community); Siemens’ own drafting guide inserts the revision block with the Tabulated Note function (Siemens blog, 15 January 2026). Where the marker sits, which symbol, whether the revision index is a numbered triangle, which note wording: that lives in the company drafting standard.

A pass has two parts: the NX mechanics for the user’s release, and a citation into the company’s drafting guideline, section and revision. An assistant that cannot cite the guideline fails even when the mechanics are right. That is what our NX Knowledge Chatbot is built for: read-only, a citation on every answer, “not in your material” when the guideline is silent.

Class 2: Method Questions Need Your Modeling Guideline, Not Siemens’

WAVE questions cannot be answered from Siemens documentation alone, because “stable” is defined by the company. A pass cites the company’s modeling guideline for the stability rule and the NX command path for the repair. A fail cites neither and offers general advice about associativity.

Question 4 asks for stable, associative WAVE links. Every NX shop we have worked with has a rule for this: what may be linked from where, whether links go to a control structure or straight to detail parts, which objects are allowed as parents. The rule is in no Siemens document, so an assistant grounded only in vendor material cannot pass. One that has read the modeling guideline can, and it should say “per modeling guideline section x”. We compared the design choices behind that rule in part families versus WAVE versus NXOpen.

Question 5, repairing broken links, has a documented NX side. Community answers converge on the Interpart Link Browser: select the broken link, choose Edit to open the WAVE Geometry Linker, set Parent Part to Other Part and pick the replacement parent. The alternative runs through the Part Navigator, editing the linked feature with rollback. A general relinker exists for bulk cases and needs a WAVE control licence (Siemens Community). A pass gives one of these paths for the user’s release plus the company rule for which parent is allowed as the new one.

Before anyone repairs anything, it helps to see the link inventory. This NXOpen Python journal lists every feature in the work part with its type string, so the WAVE-linked ones can be filtered for the release in use:

# NXOpen Python journal: list features in the work part with their type.
# Run from Developer tab > Journal > Play. Filter the type string for linked
# features as your release reports it (check the first run's output).
import NXOpen

session = NXOpen.Session.GetSession()
work_part = session.Parts.Work
lw = session.ListingWindow
lw.Open()

for feature in work_part.Features:
    label = feature.GetFeatureName()   # e.g. "EXTRUDE(3)"
    kind = feature.FeatureType          # type string, release dependent
    state = "suppressed" if feature.Suppressed else "active"
    lw.WriteLine(f"{feature.Timestamp:5d}  {kind:<24} {label:<28} {state}")

GetFeatureName, FeatureType, Suppressed and Timestamp are documented members of NXOpen.Features.Feature (NX Journaling). The journal only reads. In the next class, reading stops being enough.

This runs as a POC. What’s missing for production: the company guideline indexed with citations, a preview-and-confirm gate in front of NXOpen, audit log, SSO, on-premise or EU-cloud hosting, operations. We close the gap from “runs on my machine” to “runs in the enterprise” as a fixed-scope NX AI pilot project.

Class 3: Action Requests Need NXOpen, a Gate and Your Keyway Standard

“Design a keyway of type xy in this shaft” is not a question. It is an instruction to modify geometry, and the scoring changes completely: the answer is a feature in the model, produced by NXOpen, and the pass condition is that nothing was built before a human confirmed it. The doctrine we hold on every project: “AI proposes, NXOpen executes, rules and a human validate.”

Three things must happen, in order.

The assistant must know the standard. Parallel keys and keyways in DACH machine building follow DIN 6885-1, and most companies overlay their own table: key width per shaft diameter range, keyway depth, tolerance class, end shape. “Type xy” refers to that table. Without it the assistant cannot pick width and depth, and a pass says so instead of recalling values from the public standard.

The assistant must stop when parameters are missing. The request names neither shaft diameter, key length, position nor orientation. A pass reads what it can from the model (the selected cylindrical face gives the diameter) and asks for the rest in one round. A fail assumes defaults and builds. The NX Action Assistant service page states it plainly: “If a request is ambiguous, the assistant asks instead of guessing, and anything it does propose still passes the confirm gate.”

The assistant must execute through a gate. The proposal shows the parameters, the table row they come from, and the feature it will create. The engineer confirms, NXOpen creates the feature in the running session, one undo mark, one log entry. Our geometry creation assistant is that pattern for new parametric geometry; the rest of the NX AI assistants and chatbots family applies the same gate to edits, checks and drawings.

We would advise against scoring this question on the geometry alone. A keyway with the right dimensions and no confirmation step is a fail, because the same behaviour on a released part is an incident. The gate is the deliverable.

Scoring the NX AI Test Questions: Pass, Fail and Evidence

Score each question pass, partial or fail in words, with one line of evidence. Colours without evidence are useless three weeks later, when the pilot report is argued over. This is the sheet we use.

Question	Pass looks like	Fail looks like	Evidence to log
1 Legacy sketch constraints	Names release and sketch environment, quotes the toggle for that release, names the customer default	One menu path, no version, no environment	Release stated; toggle name; source cited
2 Sweep along path	Sweep along Guide, two inputs, notes when Swept fits better	Generic “sweep”, no command name	Command name; distinction to Swept
3 Change callout	NX mechanics plus company drafting standard, section cited	NX mechanics only, or a guess at the standard	Guideline document and section cited
4 Stable WAVE links	Company modeling guideline cited, allowed parents named	General associativity advice, no company rule	Guideline section; rule matches current revision
5 Repair broken WAVE links	Interpart Link Browser or Part Navigator path for the release, plus allowed replacement parent	Path from another release, or no rule for the new parent	Path verified in NX; company rule cited
6 Keyway in shaft	Reads diameter, asks for missing values, proposes from company table, builds only after confirm	Builds on assumed values, or builds without a gate	Parameters asked; table row; confirm step; undo mark; log entry

Two scoring rules from our pilots. A confident answer with no source scores fail, not partial, even if it happens to be right: next time it will be wrong and nobody will notice. And geometry written to a part without a confirmation step ends the action-class test for that candidate.

How to Run the NX AI Test in One Afternoon

One NX workstation, one methods engineer, the six questions plus ten of your own. In order:

Pull the last ten questions from your CAD support channel and add them to the six. Real questions have the right difficulty; invented ones are too easy or too exotic.
Write the gold answer for each before the session: release, command, guideline section. Without it, scoring turns into a debate.
Fix the NX release for the whole session and write it on the sheet. Answers for another release are fails.
Give the candidate the modeling guideline and the drafting standard through its documented ingestion route. No ingestion, no questions 3 to 5.
Ask all questions with identical wording. Do not let the vendor rephrase.
For question 6, open a scratch part with a shaft, run the request, and stop at the first proposal. Check parameters, table row and confirmation prompt before you confirm.
Log pass, partial or fail with one evidence line each, two raters, disagreements discussed.
Re-run question 1 the next morning. A different answer is a governance problem, not a quirk.

Half a day per candidate is realistic. Step 4 takes longer than the session itself; that is the honest cost of testing anything beyond public documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are NX AI test questions?

NX AI test questions are real questions NX users would ask a colleague, used as an acceptance test for an NX AI assistant. The six here came from a machine builder’s NX users and fall into three classes: documentation (right release, exact command), method (company modeling guideline) and action (gated NXOpen execution).

Can Designcenter Copilot pass these NX AI test questions?

It is a fair candidate for class 1. Siemens describes Designcenter Copilot as grounded in Designcenter documentation and best practices, so command and version questions are in scope. Questions 3 to 5 need your drafting standard and modeling guideline, which are not in Siemens documentation, and question 6 needs a gated write path into the model. Test it rather than assume.

Knowledge chatbot vs action assistant: which do we test first?

The knowledge side. Questions 1 to 5 are read-only, carry no risk to a part, and tell you within an afternoon whether the candidate can cite your own guidelines. Only a candidate that passes the citation test earns the action test: an assistant that guesses on documentation will also guess on keyway parameters.

How much does an NX AI pilot cost?

The service pages list fixed-price pilots: an NX Knowledge Chatbot pilot and an NX Action Assistant proof of concept, both four to six weeks and creditable against a rollout. Each ends with a quality report measured on your team’s questions: the scoring sheet above, applied over the whole pilot group.

Does “training the AI on our data” mean fine-tuning a model?

In practice, no. What users call training is retrieval over your guidelines, standards, project documents and code, plus tool access into NX and Teamcenter. Fine-tuning is the exception, and we advise against it as a first step because it bakes today’s knowledge into a model that the next NX release immediately dates. Retrieval moves with your documents.

Next Step

Send us your team’s version of these six questions and the guideline that should answer them. We show the answers, with citations, on your material before you commit to anything.

Talk to our engineers about running the six NX AI test questions on your NX

References

Siemens, “AI-enabled CAD capabilities in Designcenter CAD” (Design Copilot powered by Microsoft Phi-3): https://www.siemens.com/en-us/products/designcenter/cad-software/ai/ (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Siemens, “Welcome to the September 2026 Early Access Program for Designcenter” (Designcenter 2612, 31 August to 25 September 2026): https://resources.sw.siemens.com/en-US/presentation-welcome-to-designcenter-early-access-program/ (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Saratech, “Old vs. New Siemens NX Sketch Solver Guide”, 10 July 2026 (new sketch solver since NX 1926, June 2020): https://saratech.com/2026/07/old-vs-new-nx-sketch-solver/ (retrieved 24 September 2026)
PLM Tech Talk, “How to Enable New Sketch | Siemens NX” (Early Access Features toggle, NX 2007): https://plmtechtalk.com/2022/05/04/how-to-enable-new-sketch-siemens-nx/ (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Swoosh Technologies, “The New NX Sketch vs. The Old NX Sketch”, 16 April 2021 (toggle name and restart): https://www.swooshtech.com/2021/04/16/the-new-nx-sketch-vs-the-old-nx-sketch/ (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Siemens Community, “How to get continuous auto dimension in latest version (NX 1965) in sketch” (customer default path): https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/question/0D54O00006rgWwASAU/how-to-get-continuous-auto-dimension-in-latest-version-nx1965-in-sketch (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Siemens Community, “How do I stop NX from automatically disabling Create Inferred Constraints on a sketch?”: https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/question/0D54O00007rHNUySAO/how-do-i-stop-nx-from-automatically-disabling-create-inferred-constraints-on-a-sketch (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Mechanicaleng blog, “Siemens NX how to use Sweep along Guide” (ribbon path, section and guide inputs): https://mechanicalengblog.com/siemens-nx-how-to-use-sweep-along-guide/ (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Siemens Community, “Sweep along Guide, Swept, V-swept?” (difference between the commands): https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/question/0D54O000061xab6SAA/sweep-along-guidesweptvswept (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Siemens Community, “How to put a letter/number in a circle within a note in Drafting module?” (custom symbol in a note): https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/question/0D54O000070rpygSAA/how-to-put-a-letternumber-in-a-circle-within-a-note-in-drafting-module (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Siemens NX Design blog, “Designcenter NX | How to | Creating Technical Drawings”, 15 January 2026 (revision block via Tabulated Note): https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/nx-design/designcenter-nx-how-to-technical-drawings (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Siemens Community, “WAVE option – linking and repairing broken links” (Interpart Link Browser, WAVE Geometry Linker, Other Part, general relinker and WAVE control licence): https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/question/0D54O000061xQkqSAE/wave-option-linking-and-repairing-broken-links (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Siemens Community, “How can I relink a broken, Position Independent WAVE link?” (Edit with Rollback route): https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/question/0D54O00007Mj90WSAR/hi-how-can-i-relink-a-broken-position-independent-wave-link-thank-in-advance (retrieved 24 September 2026)
NX Journaling, “NXOpen.Features.Feature and the Feature Collection” (GetFeatureName, FeatureType, Suppressed, Timestamp): https://nxjournaling.com/content/nxopenfeaturesfeature-and-feature-collection (retrieved 24 September 2026)
Fasten.it, “DIN 6885-1 Parallel keys” (standard reference for parallel keys and keyways): https://www.fasten.it/en/norms/norm/din_6885-1 (retrieved 24 September 2026)