GitHub has released Stacked Pull Requests in public preview, letting developers split large changes into smaller, dependent PRs that can be reviewed and merged independently while preserving existing branch protection and review policies. The feature responds to review bottlenecks created by AI-assisted code generation outpacing human review capacity. Stacked development, popularized by Meta's internal tooling and offered by third-party tools like Graphite and Sapling, is now natively supported in GitHub, reducing operational overhead for teams. The move aligns with GitHub's broader push toward safer AI-human collaboration workflows, including Copilot coding agents and CodeQL enhancements.
Questions this post answers
What are GitHub's new stacked pull requests and what problem do they solve?
Stacked pull requests, now in public preview on GitHub, let developers break a large change into a sequence of smaller, dependent pull requests that build on each other and can be reviewed independently. They address the growing gap between fast AI-assisted code generation and limited human review capacity by shrinking each PR to a single logical step, such as a new API or schema change, while preserving existing branch protection, review workflows, and merge policies. See daily.dev for more on how teams are adapting code review workflows to AI-generated code.
Who else offers tooling for stacked diffs besides GitHub?
Meta popularized stacked diffs internally, and companies such as Graphite and Sapling built dedicated tooling around similar workflows before GitHub added native support. Many teams previously relied on these third-party tools or manual branch management to achieve comparable results, since GitHub itself lacked built-in support for dependent, sequential pull requests until its public preview release. Compare stacked-diff tools like Graphite and Sapling against GitHub's native feature on daily.dev.
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