I’ve seen the memes. “If err != nil” repeated fifty times. Go’s error handling is “verbose.” It’s “tedious.” It’s “boring.”

I used to agree. Then I spent a year debugging production services and changed my mind.

The thing nobody talks about

Every if err != nil is a decision point. What do you do with the error? Wrap it? Log it? Return it? Retry? Each one forces you to think about failure at the exact moment it might happen.

Compare that to languages where you throw exceptions and hope someone catches them three stack frames up. Or worse — nobody catches them, and your service dies with a stack trace that tells you nothing useful.

f, err := os.Open(path)
if err != nil {
    return fmt.Errorf("loading config from %s: %w", path, err)
}

That’s not boilerplate. That’s context. When this error surfaces in a log at 3am, you’ll know exactly what was happening and why.

Wrapping is an art

The real skill isn’t handling errors — it’s wrapping them well. A chain like:

starting server: loading config from /etc/app.yaml: open /etc/app.yaml: permission denied

…tells you the whole story. No stack trace needed. No debugger needed. You read it left to right and you know.

I started treating error messages like commit messages. Be specific. Add context. Future-you will be grateful.

The honest take

Is it verbose? Yeah. Does it produce more lines of code? Absolutely. But those lines aren’t wasted — they’re insurance. Every wrapped error is a breadcrumb you’re leaving for the person who has to debug this at 3am.

And that person might be you.

So next time you type if err != nil, don’t sigh. You’re doing the work that matters.