Colin Vaughn

Founder and engineer at Synaptic

Source-linked engineering notes for teams building and changing complex software.

3 published engineering notes covering Architecture, Developer tools, API gateways, caching, distributed systems, MCP, Model Context Protocol, protocol migration.

Experience

The work behind the byline

Colin designed and built Synaptic end to end, including its Rust extraction engine, code graph, language extractors, benchmark suite, MCP integration, and hosted control plane.

Jul 29, 2026

What MCP 2026-07-28 Changes for Synaptic Cloud

The hosted MCP gateway now defaults to the stateless 2026-07-28 protocol. Fewer round trips, no session to lose when a graph is promoted, and a smaller hosted surface.

Jul 28, 2026

From One Symbol to the Real Blast Radius: How Synaptic’s `affected` Tool Works

See how Synaptic’s "affected" tool maps the blast radius of a code change using reverse-dependency analysis—and how Synaptic Cloud delivers that evidence securely through a graph-only MCP gateway.

Jul 28, 2026

Saving Tokens Is Only Half of What Synaptic Does

Synaptic gives AI coding agents a persistent code graph, reducing wasted tokens while improving impact analysis, test selection, refactoring, and review.