The State of GraphQL Agent Skills

Session description

AI coding agents are now a daily reality for GraphQL developers, yet there's a persistent gap between what agents can do and what they actually know. Without guidance, they generate anonymous queries, skip variables, rely on deprecated patterns, and miss conventions experienced teams consider obvious. Every conversation starts from zero. Agent Skills are an emerging answer: a lightweight, open format for encoding expertise that agents can automatically apply. In a short time, the community has begun building Skills that teach everything from schema usage to client caching, and the ecosystem is evolving fast. This talk surveys the current state of GraphQL Agent Skills: what they are, how they're authored, how they plug into AI tools and workflows, and how they complement MCP. As the creator and maintainer of Apollo Skills, I'll share what we've learned building and shipping them. Through real-world examples, we'll see how Skills help agents design a schema safely, write the right operations, and recover from mistakes. We'll examine design trade-offs, emerging patterns, and open challenges still ahead. You'll leave knowing how to make your graph work better with AI agents.