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JetBrains ships open source Go guidelines for AI coding agents

Cagri Sarigoz

Published August 25, 2026

AI coding agents write functional Go, but they default to whatever patterns show up most in their training data. That usually means older syntax, pre-modern standard library calls, and zero awareness of features added in recent releases.

The GoLand team at JetBrains just shipped Modern Go Guidelines, an open source MIT licensed plugin that gives your AI agent a current, version-matched reference for writing Go code.

‍ How It Works

The plugin includes a CLI tool with two subcommands: list and explain. The use-modern-go skill tells the agent to run list before editing any Go file, then call explain when it needs more detail on a specific rule.

The list subcommand reads the Go version from your go.mod file and returns only the guidelines that apply. A project declaring go 1.25 gets skills for Go 1.25 and earlier. It does not receive guidelines for Go 1.26 or Go 1.27 features the project cannot compile.

go-modern-guidelines list --file-path ./internal/worker/worker.go

Each guideline comes with a stable ID. When the agent needs the full picture, explain delivers a before-and-after code example showing the old pattern alongside its modern replacement.

go-modern-guidelines explain generic_methods

What the Guidelines Cover

The ruleset spans Go 1.0 through Go 1.27 and includes patterns from the Go modernize analyzer. A few concrete examples:

• slices.Contains instead of a manual search loop
• min and max instead of handwritten comparisons
• sync.WaitGroup.Go instead of separate Add, go, and Done calls (Go 1.25)
• errors.AsType for type-safe error matching (Go 1.26 and later)
• strings.CutLast and bytes.CutLast instead of LastIndex and manual slicing (Go 1.27)

Installation

Install from the Claude marketplace in two commands:

/plugin marketplace add JetBrains/go-modern-guidelines
/plugin install modern-go-guidelines

Then activate with /use-modern-go. The integration requires the Go toolchain on your PATH. On first use it runs go install and caches the binary locally. It does not modify your project files.

A local repository install path is also available for teams that want to test before publishing. The GoLand team positions this as complementary to go fix: the guidelines help agents write current code from the start, while go fix updates patterns already in the codebase.

Cagri Sarigoz( Founder )

I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.

With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.

At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.

And more than all else, I’m a father to a (always) little girl and a husband.

Contact me at [email protected] for assistance.