I was reading Yann Debray's recent post on automating documentation with agentic AI and ended up spending more time than expected in the comments section. Not because of the comments themselves, but because of something small I noticed while trying to write one. There is no writing assistance of any kind before you post. You type, you submit, and whatever you wrote is live. For a lot of people that is fine. But MATLAB Central has users from all over the world, and I have seen questions on MATLAB Answers where the technical reasoning is clearly correct but the phrasing makes it hard to follow. The person knew exactly what they meant. The platform just did not help them say it clearly.
I want to share a few ideas around this. They are not fully formed proposals but I think the direction is worth discussing, especially given how much AI tooling MathWorks has built recently.
What the platform has today
When you write a post in Discussions or an answer in MATLAB Answers, the editor gives you basic formatting options. Code blocks, some text styling, that is mostly it. The AI Chat Playground exists as a separate tool, and MATLAB Copilot landed in R2025a for the desktop. But none of that is inside the editor where people actually write community content. Four things are missing that I think would make a real difference.
Grammar and clarity checking before you post
Not a forced rewrite. Just an optional Check My Draft button that highlights unclear sentences or anything that might trip a reader up. The user reviews it, decides what to change, then posts.
What makes this different from plugging in Grammarly is that a general-purpose tool does not know that readtable is a MATLAB function. It does not know that NaN, inf, or linspace are not errors. A MATLAB-aware checker could flag things that generic tools miss, like someone writing readTable instead of readtable in a solution post.
The llms-with-matlab package already exists on GitHub. Something like this could be built on top of it with a prompt that includes MATLAB function vocabulary as context. That is not a large lift given what is already there. Translation support
MATLAB Central already has a Japanese-language Discussions channel. That tells you something about the community. The platform is global but most of the technical content is in English, and there is a real gap there. Two options that would help without being intrusive:
- Write in your language, click Translate, review the English version, then post. The user is still responsible for what goes live.
- A per-post Translate button so readers can view content in a language they are more comfortable with, without changing what is stored on the platform.
A student who has the right answer to a MATLAB Answers question might not post it because they are not confident writing in English. Translation support changes that. The community gets the answer and the contributor gets the credit.
In-editor code suggestions
When someone writes a solution post they usually write the code somewhere else, test it, copy it, paste it, and format it manually. An in-editor assistant that generates a starting scaffold from a plain-text description would cut that loop down.
The key word is scaffold, not a finished answer. The label should say something like AI-generated draft, verify before posting so it is clear the person writing is still accountable. MATLAB Copilot already does something close to this inside the desktop editor. Bringing a lighter version of it into the community editor feels like a natural extension of what already exists.
A note on feasibility
These ideas are not asking for something from scratch. MathWorks already has llms-with-matlab, the MCP Core Server, and MATLAB Copilot as infrastructure. Grammar checking and translation are well-solved problems at the API level. The MATLAB-specific vocabulary awareness is the part worth investing in. None of it should be on by default. All of it should be opt-in and clearly labeled when it runs. One more thing: diagrams in posts
Right now the only way to include a diagram in a post is to make it externally and upload an image. A lightweight drag-and-drop diagram tool inside the editor would let people show a process or structure quickly without leaving the platform. Nothing complex, just boxes and arrows. For technical explanations it is often faster to draw than to write three paragraphs.
What I am curious about
I am a Data Science student at CU Boulder and an active MATLAB user. These ideas came up while using the platform, not from a product roadmap. I do not know what is already being discussed internally at MathWorks, so it is entirely possible some of this is in progress.
Has anyone else run into the same friction points when writing on MATLAB Central? And for anyone at MathWorks who works on the community platform, is the editor something that gets investment alongside the product tools?
Happy to hear where I am wrong on the feasibility side too.
Deep Shukla || M.S. Data Science, CU Boulder || LinkedIn
AI assisted with grammar and framing. All ideas and editorial decisions are my own.