Every level of indentation is a level of mental context the reader must hold. Three levels deep and you're debugging the structure, not the logic. Four levels and you've lost the plot entirely.

I found 6 patterns of unnecessary nesting across a Go CLI and flattened each one. Here's the before/after for each.

Pattern 1: Inverted Loop Condition — Early Continue

Before: Entire loop body nested inside a conditional

for _ , sf := range suffixes { if strings . HasSuffix ( upper , sf . label ) { numStr := strings . TrimSpace ( s [ : len ( s ) - len ( sf . label )]) n , err := strconv . ParseInt ( numStr , 10 , 64 ) if err != nil { return 0 , fmt . Errorf ( "invalid byte size %q: %w" , s , err ) } if n <= 0 { return 0 , fmt . Errorf ( "byte size must be positive: %q" , s ) } return n * sf . multiplier , nil } }

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The entire loop body — parsing, validation, return — is nested one level deep because of the HasSuffix check.…