Go Coding Plugin

An AI plugin by Cadasto B.V. that teaches AI coding assistants idiomatic Go coding standards: formatting, naming, error handling, concurrency, testing, and project layout. It is for anyone who has an assistant write or review Go. It adds seven skills, a report-only review agent, and three hooks (session-start, format-on-save, skill-nudge) for Claude Code and Cursor from one shared component set, plus a Cursor rule.

The plugin owns the judgement layer of Go standards. Formatting, vetting, and linting stay with the deterministic tools (gofmt/gofumpt, go vet, staticcheck, golangci-lint, go test -race): each skill names the tool that enforces a rule and cites the source a judgement rule comes from, and the go-reviewer agent reports what those tools miss. It covers Go only and carries no business rules.

Requirements. A Claude Code or Cursor host. The plugin is pure Markdown + JSON, with no build step and no MCP server, and it installs without a Go toolchain. Its hooks and enforcement guidance expect Go 1.26.4+ (Go 1.27 supported; its additions are flagged as hints) with gofmt, gofumpt, goimports, and gopls on the host PATH, and golangci-lint v2 (v2.13.0 or newer on Go 1.27) for full-tree linting. See Host toolchain (minimal requirements) for what each tool drives and copy-paste install commands.

Table of contents

• Features
• Installation
• Components
• Using with subagent orchestrators
• Development
• Documentation
• License

Features

• Routing: you ask about a Go topic; the auto-invoked go-coding router names the tool that enforces it and the focused skill that owns it.
• Focused standards: go-errors, go-concurrency, go-testing, go-idioms, and go-layout load on use, with each rule cited and framed around the linter that enforces it.
• Linter setup: /go-lint-setup scaffolds the reference golangci-lint v2 config (references/golangci.v2.yml), or adopts or debugs the one a repo already has.
• Review: the report-only go-reviewer agent returns severity-ranked findings for what linters miss.
• Format on save: a hook runs gofumpt -w (or gofmt -w -s) on each edited *.go file.
• Skill nudges: after a *.go edit, a hook names one matching skill, once per skill per session.
• Cursor parity: Cursor gets the same skills, agent, and hooks, plus rules/go-context.mdc mirroring the router.

Installation

Claude Code, from the Cadasto marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add Cadasto/plugin-marketplace
/plugin install go-coding@cadasto

Or load a local working copy for a single session: claude --plugin-dir /path/to/go-coding-plugin.

Cursor: add this repository as a plugin (Settings → Plugins, from a Git URL or a local path). The repo includes a Cursor manifest at .cursor-plugin/plugin.json; skills, agents, references, and hook scripts are shared with the Claude plugin.

See docs/install.md for marketplace, local-development, update, and Cursor install details.

Components

Component	Purpose
Skill go-coding	Auto-invoked router: sends each Go topic to the enforcing tool and the focused skill that owns it; recommends the official gopls-lsp plugin.
Skills go-errors, go-concurrency, go-testing, go-idioms, go-layout	Load-on-use standards, each rule cited and framed around the enforcing linter (modernize, errorlint, -race, …). go-layout also owns naming, doc comments, and exported-API shape.
Skill /go-lint-setup	User-invoked: scaffolds, adopts, or debugs the golangci-lint v2 config in a repo. Never overwrites an existing config unprompted.
Agent go-reviewer	Report-only, context-isolated Go reviewer for what linters miss. Returns severity-ranked findings and dispatches no sub-agents. Its tool grant excludes Write and Edit but includes Bash to run the linters, so report-only is a contract it keeps rather than a sandbox that enforces it, and Skill, so it loads go-coding:go-coding and the focused skills before it reviews.
Session-start hook	Detects a Go workspace (go.mod or *.go) and prints one standards line; dual-host.
Format-on-save hook	After each Write/Edit of a *.go file, runs gofumpt -w (or gofmt -w -s) on that file, on the host; dual-host. A silent no-op when no formatter is installed.
Skill-nudge hook	After each Write/Edit of a *.go file, names one matching go-coding skill, once per skill per session; dual-host. Arrives as hook additionalContext (model context) under Claude Code and as a plain line under Cursor.
Lint config references/golangci.v2.yml	Reference golangci-lint v2 config (modernize plus the stack linters).
Cursor rule go-context.mdc	**/*.go-scoped guidance mirroring the router for Cursor.

The guidance draws on Effective Go, Go Code Review Comments, the Google Go Style Guide (its Guide, Style Decisions, and Best Practices), the Uber Go Style Guide, and the standard toolchain (gofmt/gofumpt, go vet, staticcheck, golangci-lint, go test -race).

Using with subagent orchestrators

Subagents do not inherit the parent session's skills. A plan runner that dispatches implementers and reviewers must tell them, in every brief, to load the skills:

• Implementer brief: "Before writing code, invoke the Skill tool with go-coding:go-coding, then the focused skills matching your diff (see its Route, then load table). Run golangci-lint run on every touched package before committing."
• Reviewer brief: "Before reading the diff, load go-coding:go-coding plus go-errors, go-testing and the skills the diff calls for; cite the rule a finding rests on. Do not dispatch go-reviewer: you are the review seat."

Use go-reviewer directly when no such seat exists, as with an ad-hoc "review this file" request. It loads the skills itself, so its brief need not name them.

Development

The plugin has no build step. Validate locally:

./scripts/validate.sh        # manifests, parity, paths, frontmatter, hooks, doc inventories, linters, fixers, tie-break
./scripts/hooks-test.sh      # bash tests for the three hook scripts
claude plugin validate .     # manifest + component structure

Beyond the structural checks, the validator enforces three invariants specific to this plugin: advice equals tooling, the go-idioms Fixer column, and the Google tie-break sentence. What scripts/validate.py checks in docs/testing.md defines each one and the drift it guards against.

scripts/usage-report.py measures how often the skills and the go-reviewer agent load, from local Claude Code session transcripts; see Measuring adoption.

Documentation

• docs/install.md: install on both hosts, and the Go toolchain each hook expects
• docs/testing.md: validate and dogfood
• docs/versioning.md: SemVer policy and release steps
• docs/authoring.md: skill, agent, and rule authoring conventions

See AGENTS.md for contributor conventions.

License

MIT