Announcing: Synapify

The Gap Between Your Design and Your Code Just Closed

Synapify is the visual DDD editor that turns domain models into working software.

There’s a moment every software architect knows. You’ve spent days — sometimes weeks — crafting a beautiful domain model. The bounded contexts are clean. The aggregates make sense. The business stakeholders finally get it. And then you hand it off to the engineering team and watch, helplessly, as the code that emerges looks nothing like what you designed.

Not because anyone made mistakes. But because the gap between “the model” and “the code” has always been a chasm that human hands, human interpretation, and human time have to bridge. And somewhere in that crossing, something always gets lost.

That gap just closed.

Meet Synapify

Synapify is a visual Domain-Driven Design editor that does something that’s never really been done well before: it lets you design your software graphically and generate it automatically — from a single source of truth.

Not mockups. Not diagrams that gather dust in a Confluence page nobody reads. Actual, running software.

You model your domain visually. You validate it. You simulate it. And then you generate documentation and production-ready code — all in one coherent flow, without any of the hand-off friction that normally consumes months of a team’s life.

No AI prompting confusion, no designs too big for AI to handle accurately, just generative AI used well and precisely.

Synapify is based on an open source library, RIDDL (Reactive Interface to Domain Design Language) that has been in development since 2019.

Why This Feels Like Relief

If you’ve worked with Domain-Driven Design for any length of time, you know how it’s supposed to work: domain experts and engineers collaborate deeply, a shared language emerges, the model reflects reality, and the code reflects the model. Eric Evans laid it all out. The vision is compelling.

The practice has always been… harder.

The tools haven’t kept up. You sketch on whiteboards. You write YAML or JSON or mermaid or plantuml to describe your domain. You hold Event Storming sessions and photograph sticky notes. You write documentation that starts drifting from reality the moment a developer opens their IDE. The model and the implementation slowly diverge, and soon you’re back to square one: a codebase that nobody fully understands, and a design that nobody fully trusts.

Synapify short-circuits all of that.

It’s built on RIDDL — a powerful, expressive domain-specification language designed from the ground up to capture the full richness of DDD concepts. But you don’t have to write RIDDL by hand, and it isn’t limited to just DDD. Synapify gives you a visual canvas where you work at the level of your domain: entities, aggregates, bounded contexts, services, message flows. The kind of thinking you already do, now captured in a form that a machine can act on.

And when you’re ready, Synapify will generate code targeting Akka or Quarkus both reactive, message-driven platforms available today. Your domain model and your runtime model are based on the same underlying concepts: actors, messages, and reactive systems. The translation from design to deployment isn’t a leap of faith. It’s a logical step.

Additionally, many other kinds of generation are available for Synapify: asciidoc, Smithy, Protobuf, etc. so if you want to skip writing the domain documentation, Synapify can generate it for you and turn it into a web site that stays fresh through revisions. If you want to write the system yourself, you can get the outline through API definitions in Smithy or Protobuf

Kick The Tires

On the Ossum.ai website, you can use the Playground to try out Synapify without downloading it. The Playground allows you to load up one of 187 industry-specific models, explore the hierarchical structure, see and edit the RIDDL code that our AI generated, make changes, validate it, etc. This is “Synapify-light”.

Enjoy!

What You Can Do with Synapify Right Now

Start from industry templates — You don’t have to begin with a blank canvas. Synapify comes with templates for common domain patterns, so you can hit the ground running and adapt from a known starting point.
Start with AI Assistance - If you’d rather describe your domain problem and have Synapify generate your model from that description, it can do that to. In fact, this is the default first-time user experience.
Model visually, validate continuously — As you build out your domain, Synapify checks your model for consistency in real time. Catch structural errors early, before they become architectural debt.
Refine with AI assistance — Synapify integrates AI to help you reason about your domain, suggest refinements, and accelerate the modeling process. It’s not replacing your judgment — it’s amplifying it.
See STD, ERD and other Diagrams - Syanpify automatically generates standard architecture diagrams directly from the model.

What You Will Be Able To Do With Synapify Soon

Simulate before you build — You can run simulations of your domain model to understand how it will behave under load, before a single line of production code is written. This alone can save weeks of “why does this behave this way” investigations. This was the main feature we wanted to deliver but UX issues got in the way. The raw capability, a Discrete Event Simulator is already built, however.
Generate documentation and code together — Because both come from the same model, they stay in sync. No more “the docs say X but the code does Y.”
Edit More Constructs Graphically - You can edit your model textually today, but that gets tedious. Many things can be defined graphically, but not all. In the coming weeks we will rectify that.

Who Synapify Is For

Synapify is for the software architects who are tired of their models being treated as suggestions. For the developers who want to spend their time on genuinely hard problems, not translating a whiteboard drawing into boilerplate. For the engineering leads who are exhausted by the perpetual drift between intent and implementation.

It’s for teams that believe software should be designed — not just grown organically through accumulated pull requests — and who want a tool that takes that belief seriously.

It’s also for teams who’ve wanted to adopt Domain-Driven Design but found the tooling ecosystem too fragmented, too manual, and too disconnected from actual code to justify the investment. Synapify changes that calculus entirely.

The Bigger Vision

Behind Synapify is Ossum Inc., a company with a clear and ambitious thesis: software should be designed graphically, generated automatically, require far fewer people to build, and be based on the finest technologies available.

That’s not a marketing slogan. It’s a deeply held engineering conviction backed by years of work on RIDDL, on Akka integration, and on the hard problem of making high-level design and low-level implementation speak the same language.

Synapify is the product that brings that vision within reach.

Try It

The best way to understand what Synapify does is to open it and start modeling something you already know. Take a domain you’ve described in a document or on a whiteboard and bring it into Synapify. See how quickly the structure emerges, how the validation catches things you’d normally catch three sprints later, and how different it feels to work from a model that’s alive.

Download Synapify and start modeling →

Or if you want to understand the thinking behind it first, the RIDDL documentation is a fascinating read for anyone serious about how domain-driven systems should be specified and built.

The gap between your design and your code has been a fact of software life for decades. It doesn’t have to be anymore.

Synapify is developed by Ossum Inc. — a company dedicated to making complex software systems swift and simple to construct.

Announcing: Synapify: The Gap Between Your Design and Your Code Just Closed