This Week in Neo4j: NODES, Agentic AI, Authentication, Cypher and more

Ashita Prasad

Welcome to This Week in Neo4j, your fix for news from the world of graph databases!

After NODES AI (don’t miss the Aura Agents Hackathon) is before NODES 2026 and the event is starting to take shape: the Call for Papers is open until June 15.
This edition also covers Neo4j Agent Skills, which give coding agents up-to-date Cypher 25 knowledge; a step-by-step guide to using Okta-issued OAuth 2.0 bearer tokens; and Cypher inventor Andres Taylor telling the origin story of how a 2010 Friday side-project became an ISO standard.

Share your experiences and influence the future of Neo4j products: Join the Neo4j User Research panel! It’s a chance to connect directly with product development teams, get paid compensation, hear about what we are working on and more!

Happy Graphing,

Alexander Erdl

 

COMING UP!

FEATURED COMMUNITY MEMBER: Ashita Prasad

Ashita is a developer advocate at AWS, working at the forefront of front-end and AI technologies.

Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Her session at NODES AI: “Building Smarter Mobile Apps with On-device AI Agents & GraphRAG” explored how to build real-world agentic React Native mobile apps enhanced via knowledge retrieval from Neo4j on AWS. All NODES AI Recordings are now available.


Ashita Prasad

 

AGENTIC AI: Introducing Neo4j Agent Skills


Your coding agent knows Cypher, but it doesn’t know Cypher 25. Tomaž Bratanič introduces Neo4j Agent Skills, an open GitHub repo of structured, progressive-disclosure skill files that give agents like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex up-to-date knowledge of the latest Neo4j and Cypher patterns, covering everything from GQL-aligned query syntax to vector search, GraphRAG and driver best practices.

 

AUTHENTICATION: How to Create and Integrate an Okta OIDC Service Account with Neo4j


Klaus Mueller walks through the full four-step setup for giving your application a non-human identity in Neo4j, ditching hardcoded credentials in favour of short-lived OAuth 2.0 tokens issued by Okta and validated by Neo4j’s SSO layer. The result is a Python driver connection authenticated solely via a bearer token, with role mapping handled via JWT claims.

 

CYPHER: I Just Wanted a Query Planner


Andres Taylor, the engineer who invented Cypher, tells the story of how a Friday side project at Neo4j in 2010 turned into a query language, an ISO standard and hundreds of thousands of lines of Scala code he probably shouldn’t have written.

 

NODES 2026: Hackathon, Developer Survey and CfP open


You might still be busy watching the recordings from NODES AI (see Community Feature) – and I cannot blame you. That could be the reason why you missed a few of the announcements we shared just at the end of the event. Not only is the Call for Papers open for NODES 2026 in November, but we are also running an Aura Agents Hackathon and have launched our 2026 Neo4j Developer Survey:


Aura Agent Hackathon

 

CONTINUOUS LEARNING

 

POST OF THE WEEK: Stephen Abbott Pugh

Fusing Natural Language Processing and Graph: Building a Conversational Agent for Enriched Financial Data

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEsY…

#Neo4j #NODESAI #GraphDatabase #AI #GenerativeAI #GraphMemory #KnowledgeGraphs

[image or embed]

— Stephen Abbott Pugh (@stephenabbottpugh.bsky.social) 30. April 2026 um 12:43

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This article first appeared on Read More

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