Future of staff-level engineering, MCP auth, CLI dev, new GraphQL tagline, governance by default, API vs. Tool design
Week of 2026-08-10 roundup
Jeff Auriemma
APIs in the age of AI. Talking Open source, GraphQL, MCP, and more
Latest posts
GraphQL Codegen, stateless MCP, prompt-as-policy, persisted queries
Week of 2026-08-03 roundup
Stateless MCP is cheaper to scale
MCP’s 2026-07-28 specification removes protocol sessions and the `Mcp-Session-Id` header, making remote MCP servers cheaper and easier to scale. This post explains the old session model, why it required infrastructure such as sticky routing and Redis, and how stateless MCP preserves application state through explicit handles.
You can't prompt your way into policy
Putting policy inside plain-language instructions gives the model a lot of (expensive) work to do before it can act, and there are no guarantees about safety. Furthermore, other prompts in the context window may be pushing in a different direction. Here's a vision for a better governance model via a context graph.
Hype cycle, bad takes, API design, GraphQL + AI, and marketing
Schema workshop: the doctor is in GraphQL: "trough of disillusionment?" The big news is around Gartner's 2026 Hype Cycle analysis, which places GraphQL in a bad spot right now but paints a very rosy picture about it advancing quickly to the "plateau of productivity" given its promise in agentic workflows and widespread enterprise adoption. https://www.youtube.com/embed/QD05b9AkVyE?rel=0 Blog post:…
Context graphs, MCP tools, plain text, making users awesome, and events!
I want to give "context graph" a definition "Context graph" is a term I hear a lot. It needs to graduate from vague buzzword to actual term of art. I think we're almost there: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ww8W4XfjsKQ?rel=0 MCP tool calling doesn't have to be a black box A practical explanation of what happens when your harness calls an MCP tool. It's both simpler and more complicated than you…
MCP tool calling under the hood
So when we say that an AI called a tool, what usually happened is a little more specific than that phrase suggests. Here's a deeper look into that plumbing.