🔗 Why you should use Ash?

This post is an excerpt from the book Domain Modeling with Ash Framework

Buy the book to dive deeper into mastering Ash!

“Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.”

— Seth Godin

Let’s keep this direct: in this chapter, we want to sell you on Ash. Not because we, as the authors, gain anything from Ash Framework’s success directly, but because we’re developers like you. We’ve used Ash ourselves, and it has significantly improved our productivity. We want to help you solve your problems, and we genuinely believe Ash is a game changer—whether you’re building small apps or large systems.

This chapter addresses common concerns about adopting Ash for your project and demonstrates how it solves real-world challenges, drawing on our experiences. These concerns broadly fall into two categories:

1. Temporary issues tied to Ash’s small but growing community, which will diminish as the community expands, and
2. Misconceptions about Ash’s purpose, which will persist until we shift our perspective to understand the complex business logic problems Ash is designed to solve.

Our goal is to convince you that Ash is worth your time.

Some challenges stem from Ash’s relatively small but growing community. These are temporal issues and let these not stop you from using Ash. Doing this causes a vicious feedback loop which is difficult to get out.

• Inadequate learning resources - fewer tutorials compared to Elixir’s ecosystem.
• Documentation can be difficult to read - though improvements are ongoing.
• Fewer experts in Ash - limited support compared to Phoenix or Ecto.

Ash’s creator, Zach Daniel, and core team members like Rebecca Le are active on the Elixir Forum, answering questions daily. We’ve seen bugs addressed within an hour, sometimes with a minor version bump—a level of support we’ve rarely experienced. The documentation is improving, with one book published by the Ash creators and this book as another step towards making Ash more accessible.

Of course, we need more and that’s where we need you to grow Ash’s community and its support. By seeing past the learning curve and experiencing Ash’s benefits, our hope is that you’ll help accelerate its momentum.