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I think this post needs better examples to show case the issue, because right now the issue is not clear. Ideally you would need an example that uses the context.Cause function, see below

The contexts and errors communicate information in different directions. Errors let upstream function know what happened within the call, context lets downstream functions know what happened elsewhere in the system. As a consequence there isn't much point to cancel the context and return the error right away if there isn't anybody else listening to it.

Also, context can be chained by definition. If you need to be able to cancel the context with a cause or cancel it with a timeout, you can just make two context and use them.

Example that shows the approach as well as the specific issue raised by the post: https://go.dev/play/p/rpmqWJFQE05

Thanks for the post though! Made me think about contexts usage more

Agree. I am note sure I understand the premise of the article. You're now recording encountered errors twice, which can look like

    cancel(fmt.Errorf(
        "order %s: payment failed: %w", orderID, err,
    ))
    return fmt.Errorf("order %s: payment failed: %w, orderID, err)

Not only that, isn't this a "lie"? You're cancelling the context explicitly, but that's not necessary is it? Because at the moment the above call fails, the called-into functions might not have cancelled the context. There might be cleanup running later on which will then refuse to run on this eagerly cancelled context. There is no need to cancel this eagerly.

Perhaps I'm not seeing the problem being solved, but bog-standard `return err` with "lazy" context cancellation (in a top-level `defer cancel()`), or eager (in a leaf I/O goroutine) seems to carry similar functionality. Stacking both with ~identical information seems redundant.