Go Dev

Go Dev (umbrella)

This skill exists to make sure the agent has Go context loaded as soon as the conversation involves Go. It is intentionally short. Its job is to route: pick the focused sibling skill(s) that own the deep reference material for the task at hand.

Routing directives — load focused skills

For each task signal below, load the named sibling skill before writing code when it is installed. Do not answer Go questions from this umbrella's fallback cheat sheet if an available sibling owns the topic.

• Naming, packages, generics, interfaces, iterators → go-style
• Wrapping errors, errors.Is / errors.As / errors.Join, log-or-return → go-errors
• Goroutines, channels, context, errgroup, sync → go-concurrency
• log/slog, structured logging, observability → go-logging
• Tests, t.Helper, httptest, table-driven, fixtures → go-testing
• HTTP services, Chi router, middleware, graceful shutdown → go-http
• CLI tools, flag.NewFlagSet, subcommands, exit codes → go-cli
• sqlc, goose migrations, transactions, database/sql → go-sql
• golangci-lint, .golangci.yml, gofmt, goimports → go-lint

If the task spans multiple rows, load two or three siblings. If no matching sibling is installed, continue with the fallback cheat sheet below.

Fallback cheat sheet (only if no sibling applies)

NAMING

• Packages: lowercase, singular, no underscores
• Variables: short names for short scope, longer for wider scope
• Exported: PascalCase; unexported: camelCase
• Acronyms: consistent case (URL not Url, ID not Id)
• Getters: no Get prefix; setters: Set prefix

STRUCTURE

• Check returned errors immediately after the call
• Return early with guard clauses; keep the success path left-aligned
• Group imports: stdlib, external, internal
• Define interfaces at the consumption site; keep them 1–3 methods
• Accept interfaces, return concrete types

MODERN GO (1.18+)

• Generics: use for data structures and utilities, not behavior abstraction
• log/slog: pass as a dependency; InfoContext / ErrorContext; JSON in prod
• errors.Join: combine multiple errors; supports errors.Is / errors.As
• Iterators (iter.Seq / iter.Seq2): lazy, composable pipelines
• Range-over-int (for i := range n) since Go 1.22
• Prefer slices / maps / cmp over hand-rolled helpers

CRITICAL PITFALLS

• Loop variable capture in closures (pre-1.22): pass to closure or shadow
• Nil interface check: interface with a nil concrete value is NOT nil
• Variable shadowing inside if/for: use = not := when reassigning
• defer in a loop: wrap the body in a closure for per-iteration cleanup
• Writes to a nil map: always initialize with make()

MCP

Use Context7 MCP to fetch up-to-date library docs when working with third-party Go packages.