Improving AI Tooling with Ash Documentation

For those interested, Tidewave works:

• follow the installation instructions
• if you’re running in wsl, install mcp_proxy (see docs, the python one worked for me) on windows, not in wsl
• add MCP server to your editor (e.g. Cursor)

   "tidewave-phoenix": {
      "command": "mcp-proxy",
      "args": [
        "http://localhost:4000/tidewave/mcp"
      ]
    }
  

Enjoy.

Here’s a simple rules file I now have in my Cursor that is always loaded:

# Ash Resources and Documentation

- Always use the eval tool to list or introspect Ash resources.
- When documentation about the Ash framework or its features is requested, use package_docs_search to retrieve relevant HexDocs.

And it works:

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Try this out: https://hex2txt.fly.dev

You’ll want to use the hex2context notebook, which tries to find and include only the most relevant sections of documentation. (I just shipped this ten minutes ago, and there’s tons of opportunities for improvement. Note that the notebook computes all embeddings locally, but swapping in paid models should be relatively trivial. I haven’t tested different embeddings models out yet; any real-world feedback would be super useful.)

To run the notebook: Run - Livebook.dev

Direct link to source: hex2txt/notebooks/hex2context.livemd at main · mjrusso/hex2txt · GitHub

Just wanted to share an update, @mjrusso. I’ve been using hex2text alongside Cursor’s documentation indexing, and it’s been working pretty well. All I do is point it to the hex2text link for the library I need, and voila! I’d really love to see something like this integrated into Hex proper.

Overall, this workflow is decent, but Cursor’s index doesn’t always get utilized when I expect it to, and it still generates a fair amount of incorrect Ash code. That said, it’s still the best solution I’ve tried so far—better than Windsurfer, Copilot, Zed, Cline, and Aider.

Also, cursor just added support for MCP which is a bonus.