[joshprice]

Right and unlike an ORM which only models the "nouns" and "relationships" of your business domain model, Ash also models the verbs.

This allows it to reveal the actions of your system externally via GraphQL or JSON API as well as modelling the data for your relational schema (although data layers are swappable and are not always relational).

[drekipus]

I guess describing ash as "the middle layers" is what helps bring the picture together for me.

The data/orm, I usually think of as a lower layer. Then you build domain on top and then interfaces on top of that.

I can see Ash be the middle layer, where you define the domain, (using nouns and verbs) and it pieces together the data and the interfaces.