The concept of "GraphQL First" is emerging as a promising approach for building modern apps by leveraging the schema as a contract between UI and services, enabling declarative queries instead of imperative code. This architecture allows for self-contained components, parallel development, and incremental adoption from weekend projects to large-scale applications like Facebook. The GraphQL community has been actively working on tools and libraries to support this approach, including Apollo Client, which is now production-ready, and Apollo Optics, a tool for monitoring and understanding GraphQL APIs. The community is also growing through events like the GraphQL Summit and focused technical support, with opportunities for developers to contribute and learn from each other.