alt Hacker NewsIf you are using LLMs to interact with sites like GitLab and GitHub, and you have the option to use a GraphQL API, you should jump on it immediately.
GraphQL is absolutely terrible for human developers to interact with, but it's like Facebook could see into the future back in 2012. I cannot imagine a more perfect API surface for agents. With the REST API on GitHub, you can consume maybe 10 issue JSON blobs before your context window is blown out. With GraphQL constraining the results you can easily read hundreds in the same token budget.
Additionally, the # of requests your agents need to make can be reduced in many cases since GraphQL can join across types whereas REST APIs cannot. You essentially get savings in two dimensions here. Quota and raw token volume per logical response.
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Although that may be true, the quota at least on GitHub depends on what you're quering. We worked directly with GitHub and a complex enough organisation hit with a GraphQL query can actually hit your hourly app limit before you even get a response.
As for GitLab, having hosted it for medium size organisations (~200 devs) and seeing how monorepo's work (they don't, we had GitLab's team show us that one page view made 50K db queries on our setup), please consult with your local admin team before firing GraphQL at it.
mine just is the gh cli. is the advantage of graphql that they can compose a query that would take multiple cli invocations?
I work closely with the team responsible for a large, self-hosted GitHub Enterprise instance. This is good advice for clients/consumers of GH data, but it can very easily lead to a lot of strain on the server-side. It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.
You could argue the rate limit guards should better reflect that, but that’s just not the reality of the system. Likely speaks to a lot of stability issues GitHub has been facing lately.