life was simple when there was just graphcool.

what codenames?

prisma, yoga, prisma bindings, graphcool framework, prisma cloud, ...

I hope this helps: https://www.graph.cool/forum/t/graphcool-framework-and-prisma/2237?u=nilan 🙂

sometimes it seems like graphcool is deprecated in favor of a bunch of tools where you have to do everything that graphcool did, yourself

@RedShift I understand and appreciate your frustration. I started from a hand built GraphQL server (in Elixir, even) before coming to GraphCool / Prisma. From the flip side, Graphcool felt magical until I needed custom hatches to do almost anything outside of CRUD. To make a simple external API call, I had to learn Graphcool's various implementations. It frustrated me. Prisma plus the tool soup you mentioned really helped me with that flexibility and convenience. If your application is mostly CRUD, Graphcool is an awesome solution.

Similar experience here @lawjolla -- Prisma is definitely the right abstraction, but for those coming from GCF it will take time to fully understand and appreciate what Prisma really is. It took us about a month to fully transition an app from GCF to Prisma and it was not without frustration. These are bleeding edge tools and documentation is sparse in many areas. My advice for anyone feeling the pain of transitioning to Prisma is to build a GraphQL server by hand -- it will quickly become evident what Prisma really is.

@steve I've given exactly the same advice! Having built one by hand, I knew exactly what Prsima was after 5 minutes. But to the outside looking in, it's understandably confusing.