It isn't entirely clear to me how that relates to what I said. errcheck prevents you from dropping errors or catching them but then overwriting them before doing anything else. There's a flag you can twiddle to throw a lint error on using underscore to ignore an error, too, if you're really perturbed about that. I have a personal rule to always have a comment explaining why it's OK to do that that predates AI coding rules. This seems to meet your criteria.