Field & @Deprecated descriptions silently dropped when they don't start with a letter

[levit0mer]

Hi team,
First, thanks for graphql-kotlin-codegen, it's been a really nice fit for our Kotlin services and the codegen pipeline is genuinely lovely to work with. Wanted to flag a subtle issue that bit us this week and took a while to chase down because the codegen exits cleanly and the generated .kt files look fine at a glance.

TL;DR

Any GraphQL description whose first non-empty line does not start with an ASCII letter (e.g. it begins with (, [, a digit, `, @, an emoji, etc.) is silently dropped from the generated Kotlin annotations. The same code path also feeds @Deprecated("reason"), so deprecation reasons can silently become empty strings — which for us meant downstream partners lost the upgrade guidance entirely and we only noticed in QA.

Repro

I've put together a minimal reproduction here:

https://github.com/levit0mer/gqlkc-description-repro

git clone https://github.com/levit0mer/gqlkc-description-repro
cd gqlkc-description-repro
npm install
npx graphql-codegen --config codegen.yml
# inspect generated/Schema.kt vs expected/Schema.kt

The schema (excerpt) - these are the kind of descriptions we use across our booking/payments domain:

type Payment {
  """3D Secure verification status returned by the PSP."""
  threeDsStatus: String

  """(Deprecated) Use paymentVerification instead."""
  legacyVerification: String @deprecated(reason: "(internal) replaced by paymentVerification in v3")

  """`booking.id` of the parent itinerary."""
  bookingRef: String!
}

Expected Schema.kt

data class Payment(
  @GraphQLDescription("3D Secure verification status returned by the PSP.")
  val threeDsStatus: String? = null,

  @GraphQLDescription("(Deprecated) Use paymentVerification instead.")
  @Deprecated("(internal) replaced by paymentVerification in v3")
  val legacyVerification: String? = null,

  @GraphQLDescription("`booking.id` of the parent itinerary.")
  val bookingRef: String,
)

Actual Schema.kt

data class Payment(
  val threeDsStatus: String? = null,

  @Deprecated("")
  val legacyVerification: String? = null,

  val bookingRef: String,
)

Every description on those three fields is gone, and - the part that really worried us - the @Deprecated reason is now an empty string, so consumers of our generated SDK have no idea why the field is deprecated or what to migrate to.

I tried a few workarounds (escaping, leading whitespace, wrapping differently) but couldn't find a pattern that preserves the description when it starts with a non-letter. Happy to provide more details or a smaller repro if that helps narrow it down.

Versions:

• @expediagroup/graphql-kotlin-codegen: 3.9.5
• @graphql-codegen/cli: 6.1.1
• node: 22.x
• macOS 14

Thanks again - and apologies for the wall of text, just wanted to give you everything in one place.

Tomer