Ash Enterprise

A reference Elixir/Ash application: a base template for enterprise software — ERP, workflow management, line-of-business systems — with an opinionated answer for every cross-cutting concern, and a repeatable process for growing the domain model over time.

The argument is in docs/manifesto/. The code is the evidence. Several things here look unusual on purpose; the reasoning is written down.

The capstone is published: a vet-clinic demo carved from this tree, showing agents reading an Ash codebase instead of grepping it — lukegalea/clinic-demo, with its story and evidence index in docs/capstone/storyline.md.

The thesis

The cross-cutting concerns of enterprise software are declarable. Declare them once, derive them everywhere, and what is left over is the actual business.

Enterprise software is not hard because any one feature is hard. It is hard because ownership, hierarchical access control, audit, versioning, multitenancy, lifecycle and integration surfaces cross-cut every entity. Written per feature, they decay. Declared once, they cannot.

Every enterprise application answers the same questions

Not the same features — the same questions. Who owns this record; who may see it; what happened to it and can you prove it; whose tenant is it; where did the data come from; how does the contract change without breaking the callers you cannot see. Most systems answer them one feature at a time, and find out in month nine which answers disagree.

This is the ledger. ✅ means built, covered by a named test, and running in a deployment we operate; 🟡 means it works with a limitation stated in the answer; 🔵 means a decision is written down and no code exists; ⚪ means a gap with no decision taken.

16 of 54 enterprise questions have a shipped answer.

✅ Shipped 16 · 🟡 Partial 27 · 🔵 Planned 5 · ⚪ Open 6

Section	Shipped	Partial	Planned	Open
Who are you, and what may you do?	5	4	0	1
What happened, and can you prove it?	6	5	0	0
Whose data is it?	2	3	0	1
Where does data come from, and where does it go?	1	3	3	2
How does it change, and keep running?	2	7	2	1
Can you prove it, continuously?	0	5	0	1

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗