Speeding up GitHub Actions lint pipelines for large Go codebases

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0200

TL;DR. Lint on a large Go monorepo went from 63 seconds to about 25 seconds on warm cache, with macOS skipped on branches. Five changes: concurrency group, conditional OS matrix, combined cache restore and save, explicit go mod download, and incremental golangci-lint --new-from-rev. None require a self-hosted runner.

A large Go codebase makes the CI lint stage the part developers feel most: every push, on every branch. Lint feedback that takes a minute and a half kills iteration speed and quietly trains people to push less often, which is the opposite of what you want.

Github Actions on Project Wintermute

Speeding up GitHub Actions lint pipelines for large Go codebases