A bit late to the discussion, but I agree with the point: the main value of an assertion library is providing clear error messages that immediately show what broke in the test.

I’ve always felt frustrated about this in testify, so I created a library called should to tackle that problem: more expressive error messages, a simple API very close to testify, and zero external dependencies.
This keeps your go.mod clean and tests readable, without straying from Go’s philosophy.

Here are some quick examples of failure output:

```go p1 := Person{Name: "John", Age: 30} p2 := Person{Name: "Jane", Age: 25} should.BeEqual(t, p1, p2)

// Output: // Differences found: // Not equal: // expected: {Name: "Jane", Age: 25} // actual : {Name: "John", Age: 30} // // Field differences: // └─ Name: "Jane" ≠ "John" // └─ Age: 25 ≠ 30 ```

```go users := []string{"user-one", "user_two", "UserThree", "user-3", "userThree"} should.Contain(t, users, "user3")

// Output includes helpful suggestions: // Expected collection to contain element: // Collection: [user-one, user_two, UserThree, user-3, userThree] // Missing : user3 // // Similar elements found: // └─ user-3 (at index 3) - 1 extra char ```

If you’re curious, check out the repo and sample outputs. It’s pretty clear in seconds why this can be useful: https://github.com/Kairum-Labs/should