Effective Go

A set of guidelines for writing, reviewing, and refactoring Go programs. Go is a programming language, and the guidance covers formatting, naming, errors, concurrency, interfaces, and documentation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating or changing Go code. It reminds you to run gofmt, check errors, keep interfaces small, use channels for shared work, and document exported code.
Why use it?
It gives Go code a consistent style and highlights common correctness and maintainability practices. This makes reviews and future changes easier to handle.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/openshift/oc/effective-go
Any agent
npx skills add openshift/oc --skill effective-go
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/openshift/oc

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 294 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00044 $0.00294
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00147
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00059
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00029

Measured 2d ago against content hash face4c96317c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Effective Go scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to Effective Go — 1 line differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.claude/skills/effective-go/SKILL.md · 32 lines

What it actually says

Effective Go

Apply best practices and conventions from the official Effective Go guide to write clean, idiomatic Go code.

When to Apply

Use this skill automatically when:

  • Writing new Go code
  • Reviewing Go code
  • Refactoring existing Go implementations

Key Reminders

Follow the conventions and patterns documented at https://go.dev/doc/effective_go, with particular attention to:

  • Formatting: Always use gofmt - this is non-negotiable
  • Naming: No underscores, use MixedCaps for exported names, mixedCaps for unexported
  • Error handling: Always check errors; return them, don't panic
  • Concurrency: Share memory by communicating (use channels)
  • Interfaces: Keep small (1-3 methods ideal); accept interfaces, return concrete types
  • Documentation: Document all exported symbols, starting with the symbol name

References

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 32 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A face4c96317c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Effective Go is a skill published in the GitHub repository openshift/oc (245 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 294 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to Effective Go, differing in 1 line, and is treated as a copy.

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