Josh Price on Ash & Alembic

Josh Price, founder & CTO of Alembic and one of the core forces behind Ash Framework, joins me for a wide-ranging conversation that starts with the origin story of Alembic, winds through the history of GraphQL and Ash, and lands on Clarity — his new interactive introspection and visualization tool for understanding your Ash codebase. Josh has been writing Elixir for over ten years and building Alembic for nine, which gives him a rare perspective on how the ecosystem has matured and where it's headed in an agentic world.

We trace how Josh's frustration with real-time data at a gaming company pointed him toward Elixir and Erlang, how that led to an obsession with GraphQL domain modeling, and how that obsession eventually collided with Ash — which turned out to solve exactly the problems he'd been hacking around for years. We talk about what Ash actually is beyond an API generator, why auto-generated migrations are criminally underrated, and why the developers who resist Ash most are often the ones in the middle of the experience curve. Josh also shares the inside story of how slowing Zack Daniel down was actually the best thing that ever happened to the Ash ecosystem.

A big chunk of the conversation covers the AI moment we're in right now — Claude Code workflow tips (including the /insights command and how to keep session history beyond 30 days), why CLIs are beating MCPs for LLM tool use, Claude Code skills and usage rules for progressive disclosure, and how Clarity grew from Ash's built-in introspection into something far more interesting: an in-memory Erlang digraph knowledge graph of your entire Elixir application. Josh also shares his take on multi-model databases, the disappearance of the UI, and why the only limits left for software engineers are taste, judgment, and imagination.

Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Alembic: https://alembic.com.au
- Clarity (Hex): https://hex.pm/packages/clarity
- Ash Framework: https://ash-hq.org
- Ash Framework book: https://pragprog.com/titles/ldash/ash-framework/
- Killswitch: https://killswitch.app

Connect with Josh:
- Website: https://alembic.com.au
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/joshprice
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcprice

Sponsors:
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io
- Jido: https://agentjido.xyz/discord

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