alt Hacker NewsEchoing my comment from one of the other threads:
We have been using Ash at work for the past nine months. Our experience has been brutal. Learning curve is absurdly steep. Macros everywhere means you have to trawl through documentation to find information about the exact thing you're trying to do, and often cannot. Every time you step out of the well-trodden path you're punished with cryptic errors, for which there's nearly nothing on the web, and AI tools are clueless about. So your only option is to post about it in the Ash discord (which is for some reason not part of the official Elixir discord) and hope that someone responds before you lose your mind.
The only thing it has done for us is that our data layer has started to look somewhat standardized. This may be a reasonable benefit for larger teams that don't have any code quality or architecture discipline. For small teams though, and especially for solo projects, I wouldn't recommend it. Your productivity will suffer.
Replies
I'm honestly really sad to hear you've had a bad time. My apologies.
Quite a few users have commented that the free support in Discord is incredibly fast and comprehensive. Zach responds unreasonably quickly and often you've run into a bug or unclear documentation that is fixed virtually instantly.
Like Zach mentioned, please help us understand where your challenges are and we'll do our best to help out. We can only improve things for everyone if we know where to focus our attention.
At the risk of being called a shill, if you need more reliable paid support then please reach out, we have a service for this which teams find really valuable. https://ash.alembic.com.au/ash-premium-support
Besides discord, Elixir Forum's Ash section is generally pretty good, too (and is probably better for information retention and searching)
I've been working on a project for a few months, and I had some of those initial pain points early on as well. I've actually found the codebase surprisingly approachable and have found the team to be very open to bugs and merging PR's. Many times I've created a bug report, and within a day, it's been fixed, or within a day I was able to track down the bug and open a PR to fix it.
Maybe it's just me, but I found the Ash (and ecosystem) codebase a lot more approachable than something like Rails.
The first few weeks on the project were tough, and the documentation challenges are certainly there, but they get better day by day.
After getting comfortable and accepting the "Ash" way, I've found my productivity to skyrocket when using Ash to build an Absinthe GraphQL api. Previously I'd have to build the context layer, then the resolvers, etc.
Now with Ash, I write my action, declare my query/mutation/subscription and get all the rest for free. I can't see myself going back to writing Elixir apps without Ash.