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Comment by mike1o1 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the learning curve is a extremely high. It took a few false starts over time, but after the "Ash book" came out, I gave it a more serious try and it finally started to click for me.

I think it helped that at the time I was trying to build some pretty advanced filtering functionality using Ecto and was having a pretty tough time. While searching for solutions I saw a few mentions of Ash and that it could solve the problem out of the box.

After a few days of experiments, I found that it was able to do the filtering I wanted out of the box and was even more functional than what I was trying to build.

For reference, I was trying to add some tagging functionality to a resource and I wanted to be able to filter by that tag, including multiple tags. Can I do that in Ecto? Of course, but Ash provided that out of the box after modeling the resource.

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So if you're comfortable with Ecto and SQL, you can safely skip over Ash?

I guess, but you'll be writing a _lot_ of code yourself, that might be hard to maintain and can become brittle overtime as requirements evolve.

As an example, I wanted to add support for adding tags to a resource, and support filtering for the resource by the tag, and I wanted to be able to do this filtering both through Elixir functions as well as GraphQL.

Can I do this with Ecto? Absolutely, but I'd have to build it all myself.

With Ash, I created a `Tag` and `Tagging` resource, adding a `many_to_many` block on my resource, marked it as public. Then I added the `AshGraphql.Resource` extension to my `Tag` resource, marked it as filterable and I was done.

Now I can filter and sort by tags, filter by where tags _don't_ exist and more. I didn't have to do anything other than model my domain, and Ash took care of the rest for me. Not only that, but it probably did a lot of things for me that I probably wouldn't have thought of, such as supporting multi-tenancy, policies and more.

It really is a lovely tool, I can't say enough good things about it.

Does it have a learning curve? Absolutely! Is it worth overcoming it? Again, absolutely!

Ah. Looks like I'll have to get the Ash book...

Chiming in to recommend it too! The policies are really good too, for instance this is one from our code base:

    policy action(:invite_user) do
      forbid_unless actor_attribute_equals(:role, :admin)
      authorize_if {App.Checks.OnlyAllowedRoles, roles: [:student, :parent]}
    end

And what's nice is that these policies apply for both the API and the frontend code without having to do anything extra :)

That is like 0.5% of what Ash helps with :)

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