DOP 343: Your APIs Were Never Built to Be the Front Door

DOP 343: Your APIs Were Never Built to Be the Front Door

From DevOps Paradox by Darin Pope & Viktor Farcic

March 25, 2026 · 46 min · Episode 343

About this episode

Matt DeBergalis discusses the challenges of using internal APIs as customer interfaces and the need for orchestration layers like GraphQL.

#343: Here's the thing about your company's APIs -- they were built for your own engineers to use inside your own software. Nobody designed them to be the front door. But that's exactly what's happening. Matt DeBergalis, CEO of Apollo GraphQL, makes a pretty compelling case that AI agents are turning internal APIs into the actual interface between companies and customers. Not the website. The APIs themselves. And most of them aren't ready for that. At all. Think about what happens when you point a model at a typical REST API. GitHub's API returns hundreds of fields for a single repository object. Fine when another service is calling it. But a model? All those extra fields are context you're paying for, and they make the model hallucinate. Matt says you need something between the model and all those backend services -- an orchestration layer that takes one request and handles the mess underneath. That's where GraphQL comes in. He draws a parallel that'll land immediately if you've been in this space a while. APIs right now are pets -- handwritten, named, carefully managed. But AI-generated code is about to produce way more microservices, which means way more APIs. They're going to…

People in this episode

Hosts: Darin, Viktor

Guest: Matt DeBergalis

Topics covered

  • APIs
  • GraphQL
  • AI
  • microservices
  • infrastructure

Keywords

  • REST API
  • AI agents
  • orchestration layer
  • declarative infrastructure

Mentioned in this episode

Products: GraphQL, React, Apollo GraphQL

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