Golang Master

Language-level doctrine for Go 1.21+ (1.22–1.26 features flagged inline) in any Go codebase. This skill is the generic floor; a project's own guidelines skill overrides it wherever the two conflict, and this skill owns everything the project leaves unsaid.

Use the matching reference sections for a concrete Go concern. Reuse current context; do not load every reference merely because Go appears in the task. Project conventions and supported Go versions govern applicability.

The floor

Non-negotiables for every line of Go, regardless of branch:

1. Every error is handled or carries a written justification at the discard site — never a bare _.
2. Errors wrap with fmt.Errorf("context: %w", err) and are matched with errors.Is/errors.As — never by string comparison.
3. ctx context.Context is the first parameter of any function that does I/O, blocks, or crosses an API boundary, and the caller's ctx is propagated — never a fresh context.Background() mid-path.
4. Every goroutine has an owner, an exit path, and a way to be waited on.
5. panic is reserved for impossible states; expected failures return errors.
6. Check uncertain type assertions. Initialize maps before writes; use nil/zero-value slices when their semantics fit the contract.
7. Use compile-time interface assertions for an intentional implementation contract; do not invent interfaces just to add an assertion.
8. Tests prove the owning invariant. Use tables for multiple cases and race checks for concurrency or when the project requires them.
9. Apply gofmt and the project's owning lint/test gates; reuse current evidence instead of running repository-wide vet for every edit.
10. Operational values (timeouts, limits, addresses) come from configuration or options — never hardcoded.

Branches

When the task involves…	Read
Creating, wrapping, matching, logging, or joining errors; panic/recover policy	references/errors.md
Goroutines, channels, select, sync primitives, errgroup, worker pools, races	references/concurrency.md
Cancellation, timeouts, deadlines, context values, detached background work	references/context.md
Nil traps, append aliasing, map access, numeric conversion, defer-in-loop, zero values	references/safety.md
Designing structs, interfaces, embedding, receivers, field tags, generics	references/interfaces-generics.md
Naming anything, control-flow shape, constructors, functional options, init()	references/style-naming.md
Writing or reviewing tests, benchmarks, fuzzing, integration build tags	references/testing.md
Profiling, allocation hunting, GC tuning, benchmark comparison	references/performance.md
Old-style patterns, deprecated APIs, Go version upgrades	references/modernize.md
New module, directory layout, cmd/internal/pkg, workspaces	references/layout.md

Concurrency work that cancels anything reads both concurrency.md and context.md. A review reads the relevant sections needed to assess the changed behavior.

Tripwires

Investigate these signals when they occur in the changed path; they are not categorical defects:

• A goroutine spawned with no ctx.Done(), channel close, or WaitGroup path — it outlives its caller.
• time.After inside a loop — a timer allocation per iteration; use time.NewTimer + Reset.
• A typed nil pointer returned as an interface — the result is != nil.
• An append result kept alongside the original slice — shared backing array, silent co-mutation.
• defer inside a loop body — resources accumulate until function exit; extract the body.
• A narrowing integer conversion without a bounds check — silent wraparound.
• An error logged and returned — duplicate reports upstream; pick exactly one.
• An interface returned from a constructor, or defined beside its implementation instead of its consumer.
• Tests with unexplained shared mutable state or concurrency behavior without race coverage.
• any where a type parameter or concrete type is known.