MACEDON 2025

MACEDON is a Visual Studio Code extension that helps programmers understand and improve code with LLM assistance. It combines real-time evaluation across multiple dimensions with targeted suggestions for selected code segments, making changes easier to assess as the code evolves.

Recognition & Outreach
  • Published at ACM UIST 2025. Evaluated with 24 novice programmers and two real-world case studies.
Core Features
  • Evaluate clarity, redundancy, documentation, time efficiency, and space efficiency.
  • Select code segments and apply focused optimization suggestions.
  • Review evolving code quality and share evaluation reports.
MACEDON interface with code, evaluation scores, and targeted optimization suggestions.

Code evaluation and optimization in MACEDON. Figure 2, Liu et al., UIST 2025.

A sorting program before and after optimization with MACEDON.

An example of code refinement guided by MACEDON. Figure 4, Liu et al., UIST 2025.

Participant responses about MACEDON’s ease of use, recommendations, and interest in using it again.

What 24 participants thought after trying MACEDON. Figure 3, Liu et al., UIST 2025.

Links
Paper Link Read the paper PDF Project code
Keywords
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Code Optimization
  • Large Language Models
  • Programming Interfaces
Authors

Xuye Liu, Yuzhe You, Xinrong Qiu, Tengfei Ma, Jian Zhao

© 2026 Yuzhe You All Rights Reserved.