[mike1o1]

Very cool to see usage_rules mentioned in the blog. That tool is such a great idea, and leveraging that for Ash development has made a drastic improvement in LLM development for me. Excited to see that get more adoption across the Elixir ecosystem.

https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html

[andruby]

How are you finding Ash? I've been debating to dive into it. I'd use it with LiveView, not for a GraphQL or JSON API backend.

Is there a struggle when using Ash between the "Phoenix Way" (gen.auth, scopes) and eg AshAuthentication? Ecto vs Ash.Query?

[mike1o1]

A bit late but it’s been fantastic so far. I’m using it for a GraphQL backend so I haven’t tried with LiveView yet but I don’t think it’ll differ too much. I know Ash has their own changesets which might be a bit different, but can’t say for sure. In general Ash has a rough learning curve, but it helps a LOT for what I think Phoenix is missing or isn’t opinionated about which is the context layer. Ash basically builds that for you, and probably better and more secure than you can do yourself. The way I see it, a LiveView to display data might do something like MyContext.fetch_items(scope: socket.assigns.scope). All Ash does is derive those functions for you. So maybe you have MyDomain.fetch_items(actor: socket.assigns.user) But then if you want filtering, sorting, etc that’s all there for you, while you’d have to build that yourself with Ecto. But then did you remember to filter your joins to only retrieve the items the user is authorized to see? Sure, you can do that in Ecto, but it’s kinda just built in with Ash policies. I hope that helps - Ash doesn’t replace anything that Phoenix or LiveView offer (except maybe changesets are slightly different), it very much builds on top of it.

Edit to add, Ash is built on top of Ecto. The escape hatches are there, and easily accessed if needed. Ash.Query is very powerful and I haven’t needed any escape hatches on a small to medium sized project so far.