Creating simple tools with the help of Claude

I used Claude to generate a simple single page program to help take some of the tedium out of writing go code. Go has verbose error handling with some very common cases. I wanted to create a simpler writing experience for those cases.

Challenge

So often a go programmer will write something in the following form

err := someFunction()
if err != nil {
  return err
}

That or they'll need to include some zero values to match the function return types

err := otherFunction()
if err != nil {
  return 0, "", err
}

I wanted to simplify the writing experience of go with a simpler, syntactic sugar for these cases.

_ := someFunction //?
x, y, _ := otherFunction //? 0, "", err

Solution

I prompted Claude with a detailed specification of the behavior I wanted, with examples of the desugaring process. I had to get Claude to simplify their solution as they ran into a string of errors they were clearly having trouble resolving, but within an hour or so I ended up with the solution seen here.

Results

This is a preprocessor that improves the writing experience for some common Go error handling situations while remaining valid Go code. Future work could include IDE integration to desugar as an engineer works.

Technologies Used

Golang Claude