Dancing elephants and upgraded Elves

This show is supported by you. Stick around till the ad break to hear more about that. Happy Valentine's. This is Cup o' Go for 02/13/2026. Keep up to date with the important happenings in the Go community in about twenty minutes per week. I'm Shay Nehmad. And I'm Jonathan Hall. Happy Valentine's. Hey.

I love you, man.

Yes. I love you, bro. We we have that tenacious disconnection. I'm just wondering who of us is Jack Black and who's Kyle Gas.

Yeah.

You don't know, but we have a tattoo on our like a birthmark or on our lower backs, half a go for each. And we discovered that they connect anyway. I really like Tenacious D.

I can tell.

Go one twenty six has been released, not on Valentine's, which in hindsight, I could have told you because Valentine's is Saturday.

Yeah.

But yeah. So let's go through the entire release.

Yeah. Let's do it again. That was our best episode. Let's have another best episode. No. We're not gonna do that. We'll we'll put a link in the show notes, to that episode. You can go back and listen. We did a deep dive on that. It was a long one.

What I am gonna do is I'm gonna ask our editor to put in the entire episode just really, really sped up. Filippo, can you put the episode, like, sped up 2,000 times right now?

Fifteen seconds, the entire thing. There you go.

Thanks, Filippo. I don't know if you know this meme, but sometimes on YouTube, there's like Shrek, but every time they take a step, the the movie is twice as fast and it's like a minute long. The b movie, but every time they say b, it it's twice as fast. Do you know that?

Wow. I haven't seen that. That's an interesting concept.

I don't understand the purpose of this content. I don't understand how it was created or came to be, but I found it a very American way to say it. I am here for it. Am here for it. What I will not be here for is the meetup at Stuttgart. I'm not I'm not gonna be there in time. Oh. But if you're gonna be in Stuttgart, they're having a event, Hello Stuttgart, hosted by Alex B. It's gonna be February 19. Have you been to,

Stuttgart ever? I don't think I have.

You're like a European European and sort of guy. Nearby?

Yeah. I might have I might have stopped in at some point, but I certainly didn't, like, spend a weekend there or anything like that, but I might have driven through the area.

I love the what they're gonna do in the meetup. It's they're just gonna go through sort of like a book club. The first chapter of learn go with pocket sized projects.

Yeah. That's a nice one.

Have you read that one?

You're you're like the best I have. Well, I haven't read the whole thing. I read it before it was released and made a video about it. I liked the pre release version I read. I have a copy sitting around here somewhere, but I haven't made it through the whole thing yet.

So they're gonna go through the first and generally, your recommendation is positive?

Oh, yeah. I really like that book.

So if you are in Stuttgart and listening to this podcast or know someone in Stuttgart who wants to start learning Go or just, like, you know, get together with a community, they're gonna take Hello World and make it into a testable program, which I think is pretty cool. And I guess they're just gonna hang out as well. In Thoughtworks Deutschland, I'm not gonna even try to maybe you can say the name

of the street. No.

I'll try. I'll try. Because they have the B letter, which is actually a S S. Strasse. Yeah. So it's The the Rupe Roopmans Strasse.

Strasse. Yeah.

If if the address was the thing that tipped you over, you're like, oh, no. It's on Roop Roopmans Strasse Street? I have to go now. Yeah. It does seem like a new kickoff for sort of a new community in of Go, so we really would like to highlight it.

Oh,

yeah. I love how they say gopher curious folks are welcome. Are you gopher curious? Of course, link in the show notes. They also have, like, an x account and a meetup.com and everything you would expect.

Awesome. Good luck to you guys in Stuttgart, on whatever Strasse. I hope that you have a great meetup. Let's talk about a couple other

Don't stress out about this.

Couple other highlights from 01/26. As we already mentioned, we're not gonna do a deep dive, but I wanted to call out one thing we did not mention in the deep dive that was brought up in our channel, and that I actually hadn't even realized was happening. I think we focused on standard library changes in our that episode. We didn't talk about tool changes. There is a new change to the way GoModule and Knit works.

Latest one. No?

Yeah. That's what it does until now.

Oh, wait. Why wouldn't it take the latest one?

Now it's gonna do two versions before. So if you're running so and it's a phased it's a phased rollout. But what's gonna happen now so if you're on 01/28 and you do go modern nit, it's gonna tag your module for 01/26.

Why would it do that? Why wouldn't it give me the latest? Seems like I would want the latest release all the time.

For greater backward compatibility, so you don't unintentionally create modules that are not compatible with your colleagues across the hallway or the globe or whatever that need to pull it in. You can still bump it to the latest one if you want to, but it relaxes that default setting to be a little more friendly.

It does have the other side of the coin is that your module will go out of support. Your new module will go out of support in six months. Right?

I I suppose you could look at it that way, but there are many modules out there that, you know, you could still you could still compile because of the forward compatibility promise. You can still compile modules for Go 1.7. Not that modules existed then, but, you know, code for that old version can still be compiled. So I think it's a much less of a problem. If you are stuck using an old version of Go, and many people are for various reasons, you know, they need to support old hardware or whatever, having everybody and their and their dog update their modules as soon as Go one twenty six comes out can be problematic because that means you can't pull in libraries that no longer support your old version of Go.

Yeah. This is, like, not sponsored, but we just Anton was if you don't know him, Anton Givanov puts out the release notes and was actually on the show.

Okay. My my name is Anton. I do some open source stuff, and, I write, interactive, maybe I can call them guides or books and, interactive articles on my blog. That's mostly what I do in my free time.

I just was very happy to see JetBrains, the people behind the IDEs that for some reason my coworkers insist on using instead of VIMP.

Why would you choose those two evil options as your as your

You know why? Because I saw that Notepad has AI features now, so

Wow.

Can't use my Windows

it NotePad comes with then. Clippy emoji. Right?

It came out with a CV related to the AI features, like, last week. This is not related to Go, so I didn't bring it on the show. Yeah. But it just lives rent free in my head. So GoLand, the, Go ID for, Go by JetBrains, which amongst their products, I think is the, like, the second best after Datagrip.

I mean? Yeah. Yeah.

Where else, can I go read about the 01/26 release? I can tell you one place it's not. Yeah.

Yeah. So we had on the show in August 2025, we had George Adams from Microsoft on the show who talked about the Microsoft dev blogs and their new Microsoft for Go developers blog, which is just release notes.

Yeah. It turned out to not include any content. I I signed up to their, like, feed to follow this blog, and it's just like, oh, we managed to build Go for, like, Microsoft.

Okay. Hang on. We have to read it this whole segment because you were wrong. It is on there.

Bro, it was literally released right now. Really? I I promise you that twenty minutes ago when I opened this page, it was closed. It didn't have it. Look. Look. I have the

today's date. That's true.

Look. I I have it open.

Alright. Shai, I I owe you an apology. But for the audience, you heard it here first. Go one point twenty six point zero point dash one is available from Microsoft. You literally heard it here first because it happened as we were recording.

Yeah. In media res. And, yeah, there are, you know, a lot of specific tool chains, specific things for Microsoft with crypto and whatever, if it's relevant for you. I wonder who it's relevant for other than internal devs in Microsoft, but still interesting.

I'm curious, Si. Are you using Go one twenty six yet?

I am not. I have my Go project, and I just realized that it's still on one twenty five. Mhmm. But I am, eager to grab my laptop and, just, try and upgrade and see if it works. Deployed, you know, very simply, like, Lambda's, so shouldn't require any, like, major config or servers or whatever.

I guess so. I guess so.

Next time. What's when's next time? August?

Yeah. In August. So I've been using it. I've upgraded two projects already. One of them, basically, a big credit application. I already I was so excited to get rid of that hacky pointer to nonsense where you can't create a pointer to a constant.

Yep. Yep.

One of those, I had over a thousand lines changed just just with that change alone. Oh my god. Felt

so good.

It felt so good to just put new in in place. Yeah.

Alright. Well, we obviously highly recommend you update, if you haven't already. But I understand if, like, you're working in a like, we I I would recommend updating if you're, like, a library maintainer or if you have side projects like me. You're working in a big company, maybe wait for the first minor patch. It shouldn't take too long anyway.

Oh, yeah. That's gonna be fun.

But let's jump through a few small updates first. Lightning round. Wanted to highlight blog post from a listener that updated on the channel, on our cupago channel, which you are welcome to join. It's, like, getting pretty crowded in here. It's almost 700 people, which is crazy.

Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

So software engineer, my current title is staff engineer. I'm at Datadog. I work in making it easier to onboard customers to our APM tools. I've been doing software engineering professionally since '97. That's too many years for me to count the moment. Twenty six years. So,

yeah, if you wanna go follow lgopher, lgopher.fly.dev, and see how his journey goes. And, Augustine, now we're all listening, so you have to become really good.

Is it El Gopher or El Gopher?

You're the you have the that accent down. When we get a Russian, front end developer moving to Go, it could be like That's right. Oh, it's Gopher. But you can do the this Spanish accent. Alright. And again, it's a person from all around the world. I I think it's Argentinian, actually.

Yeah. I think you're right. I think you said he was from Argentina.

Welcome. We are a welcoming community. What do you have for the lighting round?

So we I'm tired of 01/26 already. I wanna talk about one twenty seven. There's, something that has already been merged to the one twenty seven branch to tip proposal to drop PPC 64 big Indian support from elf v one. No. I'm sorry. Transition from elf v one to elf v two because the elves just weren't good enough.

So this is like Can I can I admit something? I never remember which one is little Indian and which one is vague Indian. I don't

I don't either. And, you know, honestly, unless you're doing low level stuff, you shouldn't need to care about that detail.

So even when I when I was doing low level stuff, I had to I had a little cheat sheet made out of, like, notebook that I posted on the wall with, like, a few shortcuts, also examples of begin the end of the night because I didn't remember. What does this mean for me? Nothing. But the basic idea here,

there are no actively supported PowerPC 64 ELF v one Linux distributions. So why keep supporting it? So my understanding, and I'm not really an expert in this, but my understanding is that we're gonna still support p p c 64 hardware, but not the old elf v one binary format. Now I don't know when elf v two came around, and I don't even know the differences between elf v one and elf v two. I didn't know there were two of them.

Cool. If you can educate John on the public channel where I can see him being wrong as well, I would appreciate it.

Or do it on LinkedIn or Reddit. That's where I'm told I'm wrong on that.

LinkedIn is perfect. Yeah. Okay. Let's move to a quick ad break and then talk about AI.

Oh, let's do it. Thanks for listening to the show. We'd love to have your community support. The best way you can support the show is by sharing it with friends and colleagues or leaving a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Leave a review, leave a rating.

Okay. We kept this part for after the break because it's a bit more of a discussion, but there is a very interesting Google Group's sort of, you know, email chain going on. What is it about?

What should we do with CLs generated by AI? Lance Taylor, who we've had on the show also we say this so many times because everybody's been on the show. He asked, do we have a policy about accepting CLs that were written by AI? And in particular, he's talking about, you know, Claude or maybe other tools will say coauthored by Claude Opus blah blah blah as a tagline on the git commit. And the question is like, should we reject these?

This has been a big I don't know. I've seen it all across open source. Mhmm. One approach by the HashiCorp former CTO who developed Gozi, and I'm blanking on their name right now, was we're just not gonna accept pull requests from people we don't know. And if someone puts in, like, a Slop AI pull request, they're gonna get banned forever.

Some people are, but, yeah, that's not what this thread is about.

Yeah. And there are two sides to this debate, I I think. There's software engineering concerns and legal concerns, both of which Ross Cox in his, like, really, really great answer, which, like, could have been a seminal blog post. It's really funny that it's, like, on Google Groups, which is, like, the most non Twitter y or Redditor y space, I feel, but it it really reads like a great blog post breaking them down. I have nothing to say about the legal concerns.

Yeah.

I don't think any legal concern is is even relevant or interesting at this point, just because it's too late. We could have done it in 2023, but it's too late now. I think the interesting concerns are software engineering concerns. Like, what if someone put puts in an AI code review, doesn't read it, and submit it? Is that okay?

Are you asking my opinion now?

Yes. What do you think?

I think that it is asking the wrong question.

What's the right question then?

I don't think it matters if they read it per se. What matters is, is it good code? We should judge the code How do you

determine if it's good code, though?

Oh, that's what the code review is for.

So I don't I don't agree with you at all. What Russ writes here, and I really like, is that from a social standpoint, when I sent a pull request at work, my obligation and my code reviewers expectation was that I did the best work I can do. Sure. And I don't expect them to, for example, spell check my code. Right?

Right.

So I don't know how much of a problem this was for you, but for me, you know, working with mostly most of my life in Israel, most of the people I worked with, English was their second language. So, you know, typing out retrieval correctly, if you're working, like, on an AI system right now, I bet even you might trip up and write it, you know, I before e or whatever. Yeah. You don't expect the code reviewer to find stuff like that. Right?

I I haven't heard you disagree with me yet.

No. But you're saying it's the code reviewer's responsibility and

No. This time I'm I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the code should stand on its own merits.

Okay. But do but you do expect the person who submitted. If I

have an AI, whether it's one that exists today or a theoretical one that exists in ten years, that can produce high quality code, I don't think it is necessarily the responsibility of the submitter to review the code. If the submitter has full faith in that AI, right, we need to judge the work on its own merits. Now if AIs generate slop, and most of them do right now, at least much of the time, then, yes, the the the submitter so here here's what I'm saying. The person who submits the pull request is saying, I believe this is quality, and I'm staking my reputation on it. And I think that that's what Russ is talking about here, and I agree with that.

Basically, your responsibilities are not lessened when you use AI tools.

Exactly. Right. Right.

But it's very easy when you use AI tools, sort of, like, let go and produce lower quality work. I've dev I don't know. Personally, I've felt it. I've felt, like, the lure of opening a background agent. You know, I'm working on a b to b SaaS cybersecurity application, and then I open the UI and I see, like, a tiny bug.

I agree with that in practical terms, but in in on principle, I think we still need to judge the code on its own merit. I mean, what whether the slop comes from AI or from Stack Overflow copy and paste or whatever, slop is slop, and we need to judge it based on on its merits, not based on the fact that per se that it will just because it comes from Stack Overflow doesn't mean it's actually bad either. Right? Maybe you copied some great stuff from Stack Overflow.

But but I think there's a longer game here. Like, if someone comes to contribute to the Go library, every contribution on its own needs to be measured on its merit. But because Stack Overflow is actually a really good example, in my opinion. Because I used to, contribute to Stack Overflow, like, go while on the bus hunting for answers and trying to answer them. Not because every single question on its merit was interesting to me, but because there was, like, a longer game of, oh, you start contributing to Stack Overflow and then you gain more reputation and then you can get more tags and you get like, the community recognizes your contribution in a more long term way.

So I I don't I don't think we should let AI lower the bar. That's not the point at all. I I I don't Yeah. I don't think so. I do wanna call out there's a comment here. I'm gonna I'm gonna disagree publicly with Rob Pike probably for the first time. Oh. Rob Pike, one of his comments here is just exactly what was written by the AI. That matters. Was it the code?

It's written by a human and generated by AI. But, yeah, I also think it's again, maybe I'm just a San Francisco brained, I think it's too late. Like, would be surprised if less than if more than 50% of the code in the recent change of this is not AI generated. And finally, there's the one tiny issue of co authored by, which I really like. So I don't know if you noticed this, but if you use Clot or whatever, it adds a little co authored by ClotCode or co authored by Cursor.

So I'm gonna say that I I the exact same thing resonated with me. So I took the time to figure out how to disable that in Clubcode, and it's no longer doing that for me as of this morning.

Alright. Well, I think it's people should just read it. It's a very interesting discussion. Maybe we can get Russ or someone else from this discussion to dive more deeply into it. But the link to this, like, discussion is on the show notes, and it's a really nuanced take. I think just reading it is really, really good. Again, Russ has a way to write that just cuts cuts through the noise and writes really, really clearly. I love it.

I agree.

Well done.

Thanks, Russ.

Alright. So AI in changelist? Probably yes. AI advertisement in changelist? Probably no. That's it for this week, folks.

Yeah. AI is the solved problem now. We can get on with our lives.

Program exited. Program exit up. Goodbye.