using rails backend, best practice to develop ember frontend in rails or out?

I'm just about to start my first "real" ember.js project but I'm seriously lacking in best practices experience. One thing in particular I'm wondering about is, if I'm using a rails backend, is it better to develop within the rails distro using ember-cli-rails or just developing the front and back ends completely separately?

I first I thought it was a no-brainer, just stuck ember in rails and go. But I'm finding it a clunky experience compared to developing each separately. The automatic reloading isn't smooth (which I really enjoy when it works), server tail is a little chaotic having two players logging there, and I've only been at it a few minutes, I'm afraid of what I might find later, especially when testing.

I'm also wondering, that besides the clunkyness, the separation of concerns of back end and front end might have more benefits than sticking the two together.