effective-go

Effective Go

Overview

Write Go the way the Go community writes it, with a few house preferences that win when the sources disagree. The sources, in the order they are consulted: this skill's house rules, then Effective Go, the Google Go Style Guide, the Go Proverbs, and the Gruntwork style guide.

When two rules conflict, resolve in this order — clarity, simplicity, concision, maintainability, consistency. Clarity to a reader who did not write the code beats every other consideration. Consistency with the surrounding package is real, but it never justifies spreading a mistake.

This skill is a specification, not advice. "The code compiles and the tests pass" does not make it done; it is done when the checklist at the end is true.

Read the Companion Files First

SKILL.md carries the rules and a short summary of each topic; five files beside it carry the full text:

• errors.md — how to construct, wrap, check and handle errors
• testing.md — table tests, assertions, the Fn-field mock pattern
• style.md — naming, layout, receivers, interfaces, concurrency, context, logging, dependencies
• comments.md — doc comments and inline comments: what earns a line, what never does
• simplification.md — reshaping working code without changing behavior: nesting, splits, merges, dead code

The first time you use this skill in a session, read all five before doing anything else — before opening the target code, before writing a line, before answering a question. The summaries below are reminders of text you have already read, not a substitute for it. Re-read the named file at the step that names it. If a file is missing, say so; do not proceed as if the summary were the whole skill.

Companion: JetBrains' use-modern-go

This skill covers idiom and discipline; it does not know what changed in the Go release you are targeting. JetBrains ships a skill for exactly that: use-modern-go (plugin modern-go-guidelines, from github.com/JetBrains/go-modern-guidelines) runs a CLI that lists version-specific guidelines for the Go in go.mod — newer than any model's knowledge cutoff. It is not distilled here on purpose; it is used live.