GitHub ships stacked PRs so large changes split into reviewable layers

Large changes get a native review structure

The hard part of code review is often not the code volume itself, but the size of the change unit. GitHub posted on X on August 1, 2026 that “Stacked PRs are now on GitHub,” making dependent pull-request chains a native public-preview workflow. That matters for ordinary engineering teams and for AI coding agents: generated changes only help if humans can review them in clear layers.

GitHub’s docs describe stacked pull requests as a way to break a large code change into a chain of smaller dependent PRs that can be reviewed and merged independently. With GitHub CLI, teams install the gh stack extension, initialize the first layer with gh stack init, add more branches with gh stack add, and submit the stack with gh stack submit. On the website, users can create a chain by setting each PR’s base branch to the branch below it.

The feature comes with boundaries. It is in public preview, all branches must live in the same repository, and cross-fork stacks are not supported. GitHub can also recognize existing open PRs as a stack if their head and base branches already line up. Once linked, each PR shows only the diff for its layer, while a stack map in the PR surface shows the order and status of the chain.

The next thing to watch is agent integration. If coding agents can plan long work as stacked PRs, propagate lower-layer fixes upward, and avoid redundant CI, the review cost of large generated changes drops. That would make stacked PRs less like a niche workflow and more like the review format for agent-assisted development. The source tweet is available on X.