go-reviewer_skill

Overview

This skill reviews Go code for idiomatic patterns, robust error handling, concurrency safety, interface design, and testing quality. It surfaces concrete issues and prioritized recommendations so teams can fix critical bugs, avoid data races, and improve maintainability. Use it to get a focused, actionable audit of Go projects.

How this skill works

The reviewer scans the repository for go.mod and .go files, detects common Go layouts (cmd/, internal/, pkg/) and test files. It runs targeted checks for ignored or unwrapped errors, goroutine leaks and data races, interface size and placement, package organization, and missing test patterns. Findings are grouped by severity with short remediation steps.

When to use it

• Before merging major changes in a Go service or library
• When you suspect data races, goroutine leaks, or deadlocks
• To validate error handling and proper error wrapping
• During refactoring to improve interface boundaries and testability
• When adding or improving unit tests and benchmarks

Best practices

• Always check and return errors; add context with fmt.Errorf("...: %w", err)
• Protect shared state with sync primitives or channels and prefer context cancellation
• Keep interfaces small and define them at the consumer boundary
• Depend on io.Reader/io.Writer and other abstractions for easier testing
• Use table-driven tests and extract common test helpers for clarity
• Run golangci-lint and add benchmarks for hot code paths

Example use cases

• Audit a microservice to find ignored database errors and add context wrapping
• Detect potential goroutine leaks and add errgroup with context timeouts
• Refactor a large service interface into focused, testable interfaces
• Convert brittle tests into table-driven tests and add benchmarks
• Validate package layout and remove accidental exported symbols