It's unfortunately not a well-known feature. The Go extension to VSCode was using "go build" (without "-i") for a long time, and if you're working on something

It's unfortunately not a well-known feature. The Go extension to VSCode was using "go build" (without "-i") for a long time, and if you're working on something big like Kubernetes, it's almost impossible to work with. The annoying thing is that "go install" also installs binaries if you run it against a "main" package. I believe the only way to build incrementally for all cases without installing binaries is to use "-o /dev/null" in the main case.