Go error handling — verbose but honest_

The honest answer: if err != nil is verbose. Languages with Result<T,E> or exceptions are less noisy. But Go's approach means you cannot accidentally ignore an error (if you assign to _, you made a deliberate choice), and error paths are always visible in code review. Different tradeoffs, not wrong ones.

Wrap errors with context using fmt.Errorf("doing X: %w", err). The %w verb creates a wrapped error that can be unwrapped with errors.Is and errors.As. This gives you both a human-readable chain and programmatic inspection of the original error type.

errors.Is walks the error chain looking for a specific value (great for sentinel errors like io.EOF). errors.As walks the chain looking for a specific type (great for structured errors with extra fields). Use these instead of direct equality or type assertions on errors.

In Go, errors are just values — any type that implements the error interface (Error() string). There is no special exception mechanism. This means errors can be stored, wrapped, compared, and inspected like any other value. The repetition of if err != nil is the price of making error flow explicit.