GraphQLConf 2026

In 2015, we promised GraphQL would be "easy to learn and use". Ten years, and hundreds of billions of daily API calls later, we've learned that not all our hopes and promises turned out to be true.

This keynote is an honest retrospective from inside Meta. We'll share which assumptions didn't survive contact with thousands of engineers, the complexity traps we fell into, and what’s driving the new wave of GraphQL adoption and popularity at Meta.

Whether you're GraphQL-curious or GraphQL-exhausted, this is a rare look behind the curtain and a preview of what re-inventing GraphQL at scale actually looks like.

GraphQL's precise specification gives us incredible interoperability and a rich ecosystem of tooling to be used with any compliant GraphQL service... And yet, that hasn't led to every adopter of GraphQL having a great experience. Some leave disillusioned with performance pitfalls, security concerns, and unforeseen complexity. This can be frustrating for successful GraphQL practitioners since in many cases the solutions to these problems have existed for most of the last decade.

The Golden Path Initiative aims to make it so avoiding common pitfalls becomes the path of least resistance. By encouraging off-the-shelf GraphQL-related software to implement the recommended default behaviours, we hope that GraphQL adopters will have the greatest chance of being successful even without ingesting the vast amount of information in the ecosystem. The Golden Path is not centred on building the most optimal experience, instead it is focused on minimizing downsides: making it so users are exploring around the "pit of success", and taking them far from the "pit of despair".

But to do this will take a huge, coordinated community effort! We need successful GraphQL practitioners; maintainers of key GraphQL libraries, frameworks and tooling; and documentation writers to join us over the next 6 months as we lay out the Golden Path, its recommendations and requirements; and then next year: time to start implementing it across the ecosystem!

A year ago, we forecast an important role for GraphQL in an AI future. That prediction has come true, with GraphQL now serving as the foundation of critical AI initiatives at household brands in retail, hospitality, health care and many more. Just as importantly, GraphQL's declarative entity-based architecture has proven to be an ideal match for modern agentic development.

In this talk, we'll share a view of where GraphQL now sits in the modern enterprise stack, recount lessons we've learned putting MCP workloads and agentic software in production with the graph, our roadmap for an AI-first world, and a vision of where GraphQL can and must go next.

GraphQL has always been a community driven project. In this closing keynote, we will look at what the GraphQL Working Groups have been building and the progress made across the specification and ecosystem. We will also highlight the GraphQL GAP proposal and explore how it can open new opportunities for collaboration. Join us as we reflect on how far GraphQL has come and how the community can help shape what comes next.