A GraphQL-inspired Orchestration Language for the AI Era

Session description

GraphQL and Federation solve real problems: replacing hand-written orchestration with a declarative, typed contract between clients and backends. That model works. But the landscape is shifting — AI agents are becoming first-class API clients, and they need to compose across services, reshape responses, and build workflows faster than coordinated schema design allows. The core insight: one graph doesn't have to mean one API. What if the supergraph were less a single schema and more a catalog of data and services? That shift opens up a different kind of client language: one with expressions, data restructuring, and the ability to call non-GraphQL APIs directly. I'll show what we've been building: a language that keeps what makes GraphQL powerful — strong typing, composability, field-level selection — and extends it with the primitives clients need to work across service boundaries. It's open source and designed for any client — web, mobile, and AI agents alike. I'll explain what we learned from pushing GraphQL and Federation to their limits, and make the case that breaking the mold doesn't mean starting over.