GraphQL

“The schema system and field selection is really powerful that you can pick partial results”

“I've found that it's so good that I cancelled building an an MCP server”

“GraphQL, Jest, Llama (one of the first open weights models) and more”

“i used graphQL since it allows you to embedd your github contribution history as an isometric city”

“Something that would be a handful of lines of code in a different stack ends up being hundreds in this one.”

“Graphql allows an agent to select which fields it wants in context.”

“suddenly you need a whole team of devs knowing all kinds of unecessary abstractions”

“shove GraphQL into application stacks and environments where you gain very little benefit”

“it's useful for solving a couple of problems that large organizations at scale have like over-fetching and a single network call rather than multiple REST calls”

“GraphQL is a really powerful query language, Fragments are extremely powerful, and the ecosystem is very healthy with multiple vendors”

“That's the beauty of GraphQL — each object can store its ID however it wants”

“offers a solution that adds complexity and makes everything take longer to build”

“makes long term management of network of APIs much easier”

“GraphQL doesn't justify itself unless you're using a client like Relay”

“GQL paved the way for a lot of ergonomics with our microservices.”

“GQL gives that to me in one query, and the fundamental properties of what makes GQL GQL are what enables that.”

“what GraphQL solves as main problem, which I haven't got good alternative for is API composition and evolution”

“it's practically easier and better to ask teams to rebuild their APIs in REST than update the graphql”

“GraphQL has allowed us to not feel bad about adding extra properties and object to the response”

“that benefit is not unique to graphql, so by itself, that is not a compelling reason to choose graphql”

“GraphQL is still an amazing example of good product infra API design”

“if you haven't used GraphQL with Relay you probably haven't experienced GraphQL in a way that truly exploits its strengths.”

“having hard, unbreakable lines in the sand (vs. something you have to roll your own, or which is done by convention) is important IMO”

“where you can have the server and client agree on what to ask for and what you'll get, be compiled away is so nice”

“I believe their API would've been messier if they kept the REST endpoint.”

“it's definitely saved us from things that were "impossible" to associate in our microservice backend.”

“We are paying that same complexity tax you described, but without the benefit of needing to support thousands of unknown 3rd-party developers.”

“the way it has scaled over time -- across backend and frontend -- has worked amazingly well”

“Automatic type a client generation that is extremely mature.”

“Why they needed to replace the good old REST interface, which was working perfectly, I will never understand.”

“which is what GraphQL does really well with the caveat that whatever you decide to do is certainly not natural to these LLMs”

“the claim it’s better for tool and api use by agents follows from common sense”

“you ask for specific nested structure of the data, which can span many joins across different related collections”

“teach an LLM your GraphQL query language to let it selectively load context”

“a server capable of serving any subset of the entire schema at a time (pain in the ass)”

“I do think that using graphql will solve a lot of problems for people”

“The agent only receives the minimal amount of data as per the graphql query saving valuable tokens.”

“graphql solves a lot of other problems when querying microservices”

“Easy to grok, easy to build types for various languages and keep everything in sync.”

“select all fields except for a base64 picture of that user, so that the request is more performant”