GraphQL and AI with Apollo CTO Matt DeBergalis

May 21, 2025

Matt DeBergalis, CTO and co-founder of Apollo, is a pioneer in making GraphQL accessible for developers. He dives into the evolution of GraphQL, its crucial role in large organizations with numerous APIs, and how AI can leverage GraphQL schemas for enhanced data querying. Matt shares insights from his experience with Meteor, including the need for efficient API integrations and the importance of user experience. The conversation also touches on the evolving tech landscape, merging AI with development, and playful experimentation with new technologies.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

GraphQL's Power at Scale

GraphQL excels when unifying thousands of APIs at scale, providing a declarative query language for APIs across multiple services.
It increases developer efficiency and safety by enabling semantic, strongly-typed queries reducing imperative data fetching code.

ANECDOTE

Apollo's Roots in Meteor

Matt shares that Apollo evolved from Meteor.js, which aimed to build modern JavaScript apps with real-time synchronized client-server data.
Apollo was created to adopt GraphQL incrementally on existing stacks rather than requiring a full rewrite like Meteor did.

ADVICE

Adopt GraphQL Without Backend Rewrite

Use Apollo connectors to declaratively map existing REST APIs to GraphQL without rewriting backend systems.
This approach allows teams to adopt GraphQL incrementally and gain its benefits quickly on top of typical APIs and databases.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

CTO and co-founder of Apollo, Matt DeBergalis, joins us on this episode to talk about how GraphQL has continued to evolve over time, and how Apollo is focused on making it more accessible for developers and AI agents than ever before.

For those less familiar with Apollo and GraphQL, Matt shares the history of both, including lessons he learned from founding the company Meteor that helped him while building Apollo.

We discuss how even though GraphQL is making less headlines than it was a few years ago, it’s really begun to find its niche within larger organizations that have hundreds or even thousands of APIs and databases underpinning their many applications, and how Apollo has continued to evolve so that it can support APIs, serverless functions, and SQL- or no SQL-databases, with little extra code needed to make these different data sources work together.

Matt also highlights the benefits of a GraphQL schema for AI agents and MCP servers, sharing how the agents are generally very good at parsing the schemas and understanding how to leverage queries against the interface to retrieve the data they need. While we’ve had tech stacks in the past like LAMP and MERN, this new addition of AI to the development mix provides a unique opportunity to redefine the stack once more, and GraphQL could be a very good piece to include.

Special Guest

Matt DeBergalis, CTO and co-founder of Apollo

Relevant Links:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - The Pitt TV series
TJ - I Think I Was Murdered
Matt - Teaching my daughter to ride a bike

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.