ds-go-review

Applies to: Go 1.24+. Backend services, CLIs, APIs.

Arguments

Scan the invocation for the --no-tiger, --fix, and --full flags. Treat every other argument as review scope (files or directories); if no scope is given, review the changed files on the current branch.

• --no-tiger present → skip the Tiger Style section; run Go Idioms, Performance, Security, and Testing only.
• --no-tiger absent → run all sections (default).
• --fix → after reporting, apply only the violations whose fix is mechanical and unambiguous (a rename to the idiom, a missing error check the review is certain about). Anything that changes logic or rests on an unverified assumption — especially security and correctness findings — stays report-only. After applying, re-run any build/test/lint check already in the loop and revert any fix that breaks it — or that touched more than the intended mechanical edit. End with a summary of what was applied and what was left.
• --full → review the entire codebase instead of just the branch's changes. Explicit positional scope still wins; --full only replaces the no-scope default.

Example: /ds-go-review --no-tiger dir1/ dir2/ reviews dir1/ and dir2/ without Tiger Style.

Review Checklist

Use the checklist as a lens, not a scorecard: reason about the actual change, report real violations anchored to file:line, and flag issues even when they aren't listed. Don't manufacture findings to fill a category. Report only violations — no praise, no summary.

Tiger Style

Skip this section entirely if --no-tiger was passed. Otherwise it is mandatory.

• Non-trivial functions assert their preconditions and key invariants — don't demand assertions in thin wrappers or trivial accessors
• All loops have explicit bounds; no unbounded iteration over external input
• No recursion without provable termination
• All errors explicitly handled — no _ discard of error returns
• No post-initialization dynamic allocation in paths actually identified as hot — don't flag ordinary allocation
• Functions under 70 lines
• Variable names include units/qualifiers where applicable

Go Idioms

• Errors are values. Check them. Wrap with context using fmt.Errorf("op: %w", err)
• Interfaces defined at point of use (consumer package), not in producer package
• No exported interface with a single method that could be a function
• Goroutines have explicit lifecycle: context cancellation, WaitGroup, or channel close
• No goroutine leak: every goroutine has a clear exit condition
• Context is first parameter when present: func F(ctx context.Context, ...)
• Prefer table-driven tests
• No init() functions that have side effects
• Struct fields that are sync primitives (Mutex, WaitGroup) are not copied — pointer receivers used
• Prefer stdlib slices/maps/cmp and the min/max/clear builtins over hand-rolled equivalents; for i := range n for integer counts
• Sequences exposed as iter.Seq/iter.Seq2 where iteration is the public API (Go 1.23+)
• json:",omitzero" (not omitempty) when the intent is to omit zero values — notably zero time.Time
• Tool dependencies declared in go.mod (go get -tool, run via go tool), not a legacy tools.go blank-import shim (Go 1.24+)
• Structured logging via stdlib log/slog (Go 1.21+), not the unstructured log package or a third-party logger pulled in out of habit
• Legacy idioms a modernizer would rewrite are flagged — pre-slices/maps helpers, interface{} over any, manual b.N loops (run golangci-lint's modernize, or go fix on Go 1.26+)

Performance

Idiom-level checks only — for a ranked, costed optimization plan, use /ds-perf-plan.

• No allocation in request hot path (profile with go test -benchmem if critical)
• Slice pre-allocated with make([]T, 0, knownCap) where capacity is known
• sync.Pool used for frequently allocated/freed objects in hot paths
• No manual runtime.GOMAXPROCS tuning or automaxprocs in containers — Go 1.25+ honors the cgroup CPU quota automatically
• Database queries not issued inside loops
• N+1 query patterns absent

Security

• No fmt.Sprintf constructing SQL queries — use parameterized queries
• No exec.Command with unsanitized user input
• Filesystem paths built from user input go through os.OpenRoot/*os.Root, not manual filepath.Clean/prefix checks — blocks traversal and symlink escape (Go 1.24+)
• No hardcoded credentials or secrets
• HTTP handlers validate and bound all user-controlled inputs
• http.Server sets ReadTimeout/WriteTimeout/IdleTimeout; http.Client sets Timeout or uses context deadlines

Testing

• Public surface and error paths have meaningful coverage — flag notable gaps, not every untested accessor
• Error paths tested, not just happy path
• Benchmarks for performance-critical functions, written with for b.Loop() rather than a manual for i := 0; i < b.N loop (Go 1.24)
• No time.Sleep in tests — use channels or sync primitives, or testing/synctest's fake clock for time-dependent concurrency (Go 1.25+)

Version-specific checks

Read the target Go version from go.mod (the go directive). Run the checklist above for every project. If it targets Go 1.26 or newer, also read 1.26.md in this skill directory and apply its checks on top. If the version can't be determined, run the base and note that version-specific checks were skipped.

Output Format

<file>:<line>: <severity>: <problem>. <fix>.

Severity levels: critical (correctness/security), major (reliability/performance), minor (idiom/style).

Skip formatting nits unless they affect correctness or readability significantly.