Before starting, I want to be clear: this is not a deep dive into the Golang Proxy, but an introductory explanation so you know about it and its existence, just like I did after using Go for a couple of months without even knowing it was there. It’s Been There Every time you download a dependency in a Go project, either directly with go get or indirectly with go mod tidy , Go silently uses something called the Golang Proxy . It's an invisible and default process, easy to miss if nobody tells you about it. But, like most things in Go, it can be adapted and configured. The Golang Proxy stores a mirrored version of the dependencies you download. So, you rarely interact directly with the original source where that dependency actually lives. This only applies to public, "registered" Go packages. The proxy doesn't store every piece of Go code published on platforms like GitHub, as that would be counterproductive for both the language and developers. Why Does It Exist You might be wondering: why use a proxy at all?…