As many people seem confused, it seems that this framework is a declarative framework (think: expressing a solution like you would in SQL or Prolog), in Elixir, that seems to have the goal of separating out core logic from control flows within web apps, APIs and so on.

Over the course of 15+ years of playing with Rails, I've come to the view of CRUD being a poor choice for most real-world applications and MVC being a useful but often-abused concept. That took me down a bit of a rabbit hole of trying to think about DDD within the constraints of an opinionated framework that thinks CRUD and MVC are the thing that makes you go fast. I, on the other hand, want the thing that makes it easy to extend and maintain. I want actual events to be modeled for all sorts of real-World reasons.

I've been learning Elixir recently because it's something new, the actor model appeals from a concurrency perspective to some of the problems I want to solve, and because Phoenix looks like an interesting and elegant web app framework. However, there was a nag in the back of my head that I'd just end up hitting the same frustrations: I was, and am, ready for that and seeing if anything about Elixir + Phoenix makes life easier than Rails made it.

Ash seems to be a good candidate for part of the puzzle. A declarative framework that brings some packages for useful, often-needed parts of the puzzle (like authentication, authorization, and so on), and it seems to encourage a way of thinking about some key DDD concepts. Resources sound like domains or bounded contexts. Declarative style sounds like it might lend itself to event modeling more easily. Calculated values are a nudge towards "view models".

Never tried, I'm early on my journey, but I think the Ash book will be the first thing I pick up after I've finished the Elixir and Phoenix books I'm reading through. Curious to hear stories from people further down this journey, though!