Golang lint

Skill Harmeet10000/skills/skills/backend/Golang/golang-lint

Collection of my Agent Skills and books.

Install

npx -y skills add Harmeet10000/skills --skill golang-lint

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7 stars7 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

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Provides linting best practices and golangci-lint configuration for Go projects. Covers running linters, configuring .golangci.yml, suppressing warnings with nolint directives, interpreting lint output, and managing linter settings. Use this skill whenever the user runs linters, configures golangci-lint, asks about lint warnings or suppressions, sets up code quality tooling, or asks which linters to enable for a Go project. Also use when the user mentions golangci-lint, go vet, staticcheck, revive, or any Go linting tool.

The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

6.6 KB, ~1.4k tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Persona: You are a Go code quality engineer. You treat linting as a first-class part of the development workflow — not a post-hoc cleanup step.

Modes:

Setup mode — configuring .golangci.yml, choosing linters, enabling CI: follow the configuration and workflow sections sequentially.
Coding mode — writing new Go code: launch a background agent running golangci-lint run --fix on the modified files only while the main agent continues implementing the feature; surface results when it completes.
Interpret/fix mode — reading lint output, suppressing warnings, fixing issues on existing code: start from "Interpreting Output" and "Suppressing Lint Warnings"; use parallel sub-agents for large-scale legacy cleanup.

Go Linting

Overview

golangci-lint is the standard Go linting tool. It aggregates 100+ linters into a single binary, runs them in parallel, and provides a unified configuration format. Run it frequently during development and always in CI.

Every Go project MUST have a .golangci.yml — it is the source of truth for which linters are enabled and how they are configured. See the recommended configuration for a production-ready setup with 33 linters enabled.

Quick Reference

# Run all configured linters
golangci-lint run ./...

# Auto-fix issues where possible
golangci-lint run --fix ./...

# Format code (golangci-lint v2+)
golangci-lint fmt ./...

# Run a single linter only
golangci-lint run --enable-only govet ./...

# List all available linters
golangci-lint linters

# Verbose output with timing info
golangci-lint run --verbose ./...

Configuration

The recommended .golangci.yml provides a production-ready setup with 33 linters. For configuration details, linter categories, and per-linter descriptions, see the linter reference — which linters check for what (correctness, style, complexity, performance, security), descriptions of all 33+ linters, and when each one is useful.

Suppressing Lint Warnings

Use //nolint directives sparingly — fix the root cause first.

// Good: specific linter + justification
//nolint:errcheck // fire-and-forget logging, error is not actionable
_ = logger.Sync()

// Bad: blanket suppression without reason
//nolint
_ = logger.Sync()

Rules:

//nolint directives MUST specify the linter name: //nolint:errcheck not //nolint
//nolint directives MUST include a justification comment: //nolint:errcheck // reason
The nolintlint linter enforces both rules above — it flags bare //nolint and missing reasons
NEVER suppress security linters (bodyclose, sqlclosecheck) without a very strong reason

For comprehensive patterns and examples, see nolint directives — when to suppress, how to write justifications, patterns for per-line vs per-function suppression, and anti-patterns.

Development Workflow

Linters SHOULD be run after every significant change: golangci-lint run ./...
Auto-fix what you can: golangci-lint run --fix ./...
Format before committing: golangci-lint fmt ./...
Incremental adoption on legacy code: set issues.new-from-rev in .golangci.yml to only lint new/changed code, then gradually clean up old code

Makefile targets (recommended):

lint:
	golangci-lint run ./...

lint-fix:
	golangci-lint run --fix ./...

fmt:
	golangci-lint fmt ./...

For CI pipeline setup (GitHub Actions with golangci-lint-action), see the samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-continuous-integration skill.

Interpreting Output

Each issue follows this format:

path/to/file.go:42:10: message describing the issue (linter-name)

The linter name in parentheses tells you which linter flagged it. Use this to:

Look up the linter in the reference to understand what it checks
Suppress with //nolint:linter-name // reason if it's a false positive
Use golangci-lint run --verbose for additional context and timing

Common Issues

Problem	Solution
"deadline exceeded"	Increase `run.timeout` in `.golangci.yml` (default: 5m)
Too many issues on legacy code	Set `issues.new-from-rev: HEAD~1` to lint only new code
Linter not found	Check `golangci-lint linters` — linter may need a newer version
Conflicts between linters	Disable the less useful one with a comment explaining why
v1 config errors after upgrade	Run `golangci-lint migrate` to convert config format
Slow on large repos	Reduce `run.concurrency` or exclude directories in `run.skip-dirs`

Parallelizing Legacy Codebase Cleanup

When adopting linting on a legacy codebase, use up to 5 parallel sub-agents (via the Agent tool) to fix independent linter categories simultaneously:

Sub-agent 1: Run golangci-lint run --fix ./... for auto-fixable issues
Sub-agent 2: Fix security linter findings (bodyclose, sqlclosecheck, gosec)
Sub-agent 3: Fix error handling issues (errcheck, nilerr, wrapcheck)
Sub-agent 4: Fix style and formatting (gofumpt, goimports, revive)
Sub-agent 5: Fix code quality (gocritic, unused, ineffassign)

Cross-References

→ See samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-continuous-integration skill for CI pipeline with golangci-lint-action
→ See samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-code-style skill for style rules that linters enforce
→ See samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-security skill for SAST tools beyond linting (gosec, govulncheck)

What ships with it: 3 files

23.8 KB alongside SKILL.md

evals/

evals.json15.8 KB

references/

linter-reference.md5.6 KB
nolint-directives.md2.5 KB

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most quality gates skills give in ~1.4k tokens

Counted across 1,195 of the 2,094 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-07

Read the output and check the exit codein 54 of 1195, across 14 files
Verify requirements using a line-by-line checklistin 53 of 1195, across 12 files
Identify the verification command proving the claimin 51 of 1195, across 12 files
Run the full verification commandin 50 of 1195, across 11 files
Verify output confirms the claimin 49 of 1195, across 12 files
Check version control diff after agent delegationin 46 of 1195, across 6 files
State claim with evidencein 44 of 1195, across 4 files
Run the test suitein 33 of 1195, across 26 files
Keep state in memory by defaultin 27 of 1195, across 6 files
Make prototype runnable with one commandin 26 of 1195, across 5 files
Produce a verification reportin 25 of 1195, across 14 files
Detect the package manager from lockfilesin 24 of 1195, across 5 files

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.