cc-skills-golang: Go agents get a reviewer (2026)

Install samber/cc-skills-golang if your coding agent regularly works on Go code. Skip it if your stack is not Go, or if your team will not tolerate an opinionated style pack that still has a live dispute over at least one Go convention.

This week's pick is strong because it looks less like a pile of generated Markdown and more like a maintained developer tool. samber/cc-skills-golang is an MIT-licensed repository by Samuel Berthe (samber) with 2.4K GitHub stars, 153 forks, 17 watchers, 97 commits, and 8 releases; its latest release, v1.7.0, landed on July 2, 2026. 1 The repo's own positioning is blunt: it says the skills were bootstrapped with Claude Code from the maintainer's Go project commits, then "edited, tested, reviewed and reworked by a human." 1

The short verdict: Go-heavy teams should test it this week. Generalist agent users should keep it in the toolbox, not in every session.

What it gives your agent

cc-skills-golang contains 41 Go-focused Agent Skills across code quality, architecture and design, QA and performance, project setup, and framework or library guidance. 1 The set covers basics such as code style, naming, error handling, safety, testing, benchmarking, performance, observability, CI, dependency management, and Go project layout. It also includes specific skills for gRPC, GraphQL, Swagger, Google Wire, Uber Dig, Uber Fx, Cobra, Viper, Testify, and several samber/* libraries. 1

The design matters. The README describes the skills as "atomic, cross-referencing units," which means a style rule can live in one skill while another skill points to it instead of duplicating the same rule. 1 The package also uses progressive loading: descriptions are always available for trigger matching, full SKILL.md files load only when needed, and deeper reference files load on demand. 1

That is the right architecture for a large skill pack. The available package data shows recommended skill descriptions totaling about 1,100 tokens, while typical sessions load 2 to 4 full skill files and stay below about 10,000 loaded skill tokens. 1 If your agent environment already struggles with context budget, that loading model is a practical advantage over dumping one huge style guide into every request.

Install path

The broad install path is the skills.sh CLI:

npx skills add https://github.com/samber/cc-skills-golang --all

The repository documents that command as the universal install route for Agent Skills-compatible tools. 1 It also lists install paths for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Copilot, Antigravity, and OpenClaw. 1

Agent or ecosystem	Documented install path
Claude Code	Add the `samber/cc` marketplace, then install `cc-skills-golang@samber`. 1
Codex	Clone the repo into `~/.agents/skills/cc-skills-golang`, then update with `git pull`. 1
Cursor	Clone the repo into `~/.cursor/skills/cc-skills-golang`; Cursor discovers `.agents/skills/` and `.cursor/skills/`. 1
Gemini CLI	Run `gemini extensions install https://github.com/samber/cc-skills-golang`, then update with `gemini extensions update cc-skills-golang`. 1
OpenCode	Clone the repo into `~/.agents/skills/cc-skills-golang`; OpenCode discovers `.agents/skills/`, `.opencode/skills/`, and `.claude/skills/`. 1
Copilot	Use `/plugin install https://github.com/samber/cc-skills-golang` or clone into `~/.copilot/skills/cc-skills-golang`. 1
Antigravity	Clone the repo into `~/.antigravity/skills/cc-skills-golang`. 1
OpenClaw	Clone the repo into `~/.openclaw/skills/cc-skills-golang`. 1

For GitHub pull request review, the companion GOLANG-AI-DRIVEN-REVIEW.md file provides a Claude Code Action pipeline with six parallel jobs: quality, correctness, security and dependencies, tests/performance/observability, CI failure diagnosis, and discussion-triggered review. 2 That makes the package more than a local prompt aid if your team wants agent review inside CI.

First workflows to test

Start with golang-code-style on a small pull request. Ask the agent to review composite literals, nil slice handling, nesting, switch usage, file organization, and field names. The code-style skill covers those areas, although the nil slice rule is the one you should check carefully because Issue #70 challenges it. 3 4

Use the golang-code-style skill.
Review this PR for Go style issues only.
Flag composite literals without field names, unnecessary nesting, if/else chains that should be switches, and slice/map initialization choices.
For each finding, show the exact line, the rule, and the smallest safe patch.

Then test golang-testing against one package. The skill defines write, review, audit, and debug modes; it also pushes named subtests for table-driven tests, build tags for integration tests, order-independent tests, goleak.VerifyTestMain for goroutine leaks, interface-level mocks, and fast unit tests. 5

Use the golang-testing skill in review mode.
Audit this package's tests for table-driven subtests, order dependence, missing build tags, goroutine leaks, and over-mocking.
Return only issues that can be fixed in this package.

For performance work, use golang-performance after you have a profile. The skill's own guidance says to profile before optimizing and claims intuition about bottlenecks is wrong roughly 80% of the time. 6 A good prompt gives the agent a benchmark, a profile, and a constraint to avoid broad rewrites.

Use the golang-performance skill.
Given this benchmark output and pprof profile, identify the top allocation source and propose one minimal patch.
Do not change public APIs.
Explain how to rerun the benchmark and what result would count as success.

If your project uses samber/do, test that skill separately. golang-samber-do is the largest reported win in the evaluation data, with a 100% with-skill score versus a 19% without-skill score for that skill's assertion set. 7 The skill covers samber/do v2, including Lazy, Eager, Transient, and Value services, provider signatures, invocation APIs, and lifecycle management. 8

Evidence that it works

The headline evaluation is unusually concrete for an Agent Skills repo: the project reports 3,315 passing assertions out of 3,395 with skills enabled, versus 1,915 out of 3,395 without skills, or 98% versus 56% across 41 skills. 7 Treat that as maintainer-reported evidence, not an independent benchmark. The same evaluation file includes a note that "self-grading methodology inflates the without-skill baseline," and the cited project materials do not point to a third-party reproduction. 7

The adoption signal is also stronger than GitHub stars alone suggest. Skills.sh lists samber/cc-skills-golang with 1.4 million total installs and 44 indexed skills; the July 5 listing showed 28 skills above 30K installs. 9 ClaudeAtlas placed it in the Featured area among the top 60 of 8,945 indexed plugins on July 5, 2026. 10

There is also one unusually strong ecosystem signal. In a Google Cloud blog post about learning Go with Antigravity 2.0, Alex "Sandu" Astrum wrote that once the agent suggested samber/cc-skills-golang, he directed it to install the skill pack. 11 That is not a formal product certification, but it shows the pack appearing inside an official Google Cloud tutorial flow.

Feedback so far

Public feedback is thin for a package with this much installation activity. The available community record includes one Reddit thread, one meaningful X post, one golang-nuts discussion, two open GitHub issues, and no independent developer blog reviews. 12 13 14

The best skeptical comment came from Reddit user dogazine4570, who said the "43% number feels kinda fuzzy without context," while also saying it is "nice to have something opinionated instead of starting from blank every time." 12 That is a fair read. Use the eval numbers as a reason to test the pack, not as proof that every rule is correct.

The strongest concise endorsement came from Tom Doerr, who described it as "Production-ready Golang agent skills for AI coding assistants." 13 The most useful beginner question came from Jason E. Aten on golang-nuts, who asked for the "what and why of skills" and said he had never deployed a skill in a Claude Code context. 14 Samber answered that skills are Markdown files describing an atomic methodology or tool, and that agents invoke them automatically when a skill description matches the task. 14

Limitations to check before adoption

The first limitation is language scope. This is a Go package. The companion samber/cc-skills repo covers general development workflow skills, while cc-skills-golang is the language-specific layer. 1 15 If your repo is mostly TypeScript, Python, Java, or infrastructure code, installing all 41 Go skills will add little value.

The second limitation is rule correctness. Issue #70, opened on July 3, 2026, argues that the golang-code-style rule requiring slices and maps to be explicitly initialized conflicts with official Go guidance for nil slices. 4 The issue's proposed fix is to keep mandatory initialization for maps while preferring nil slice declarations except at JSON boundaries. 4 Until that is resolved, treat style findings as review suggestions, not commands.

The third limitation is scope creep inside individual skills. Issue #64, opened on June 22, 2026, says golang-documentation feels like a 10-step one-time documentation checklist and argues that the reusable part is Go doc comment style guidance. 16 That matters because a skill that is too broad can distract the agent from the immediate coding task.

The fourth limitation is evaluation independence. The project reports a large improvement, but the evaluation data is self-reported and uses mixed grading methods across skills. 7 For production use, run your own small trial: pick five recent PRs, ask the agent to review them with and without the relevant skills, and count only findings your human reviewers accept.

Quick reference

Repository	samber/cc-skills-golang 1
Maintainer	Samuel Berthe / `samber` 1
License	MIT 1
Latest release in snapshot	v1.7.0 on July 2, 2026 1
Snapshot metrics	2.4K stars, 153 forks, 17 watchers, 97 commits, 8 releases 1
Skill count	41 Go skills across five categories 1
Install scale	1.4M total installs on skills.sh 9
Supported agents	Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Copilot, Antigravity, OpenClaw, and skills.sh-compatible tools 1
Best first test	Run `golang-code-style`, `golang-testing`, and `golang-performance` on one small Go package before enabling CI review. 3 5 6

Install it if your agent already writes or reviews Go and you want an opinionated, evaluated rule set with broad agent support. Skip it for non-Go repositories, and pilot it before CI adoption if your team follows official Go style guidance closely.

Cover image: repository image from samber/cc-skills-golang.

cc-skills-golang: Go agents get a reviewer