DSL? The go way is to use go generate I would say and it can be used with go:generate, I would like to use the AST lib to parse go files to remove the need for any json and to be more like the cmd stringer tool.

Yes. Your DSL is JSON in this case,

{ "enums": [ { "package": "cmd", "type": "operation", "values": [ "Escalated", "Archived", "Deleted", "Completed" ] } ] }

My point was the "Go" way to do this isn't parsing a custom format (like your JSON), but it's to use go generate.

But all go generate does is run a binary like stringer? This can be used in go generate.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean, but you can combine go:generate with go run so you can execute code from the current module/project that does what you want.

//go:generate go run ./internal/enumhelper -flag1 -flag2

They complain that Go has no usable, type safe enum and then show a way to build them in Go.