7 Go Tools That Made Me 5x More Productive Overnight

When I first started writing Go, I relied mostly on the built-in tools and my IDE. That was fine — for a while. But as the codebase grew and deadlines got tighter, I realized I needed more than just go run and go fmt to keep up.

Over the last year, I discovered a handful of tools that dramatically changed how I write, test, and ship Go code. These aren’t just “nice-to-haves” — they became essential. If you’re looking to level up your Go workflow, here are 7 tools that boosted my productivity practically overnight.

1. golangci-lint: The Linter That Does It All

Instead of juggling multiple linters, golangci-lint runs dozens of them in parallel—and fast.

go install github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint@latest

Create a .golangci.yml config and let it do its thing:

linters:
  enable:
    - govet
    - errcheck
    - gosimple
    - staticcheck
    - unused
    - structcheck

Run it with:

golangci-lint run ./...

This tool catches subtle bugs, style issues, and dead code you might easily miss.

2. air: Live Reload for Go