Josh Price on Ash & Alembic
From Elixir Mentor by Jacob Luetzow
March 11, 2026 · 1h 55m · Season 1 · Episode 76
About this episode
Josh Price discusses the origins of Alembic, the Ash Framework, and his new tool Clarity, while exploring the evolution of Elixir and GraphQL.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Jacob Luetzow
Guest: Josh Price
Topics covered
- Elixir
- Ash Framework
- GraphQL
- AI tools
- software development
- interactive visualization
Keywords
- Elixir
- Ash Framework
- Alembic
- GraphQL
- Clarity
- AI tools
- software development
- interactive visualization
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Alembic, Ash Framework, GraphQL
Products: Clarity
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