GitHub Stacked PRs Brings Native Stack Workflow to the Pull Request UI

What GitHub is shipping

GitHub has opened a private preview of GitHub Stacked PRs, a workflow that turns a large change into a chain of smaller pull requests that build on one another. In GitHub’s model, each PR targets the branch directly below it instead of aiming at the default branch immediately. The company says the gh stack CLI handles branch creation, pushing, rebasing, and PR submission, while the pull request UI shows a stack map so reviewers can move between layers without losing context.

The product pitch is simple: large diffs are slow to review and easy to derail. By slicing a feature into smaller, ordered units, GitHub wants teams to keep review comments local, merge incrementally, and avoid the familiar problem where one giant PR blocks everything around it.

Why engineers paid attention

What made the Hacker News discussion notable is that GitHub is not treating stacked development as a third-party convention. The preview promises first-class behavior in the core PR system. Branch protection rules are evaluated against the final target branch, not only the direct base branch. CI also runs for each PR in the stack as if it were ultimately targeting the final branch. That closes one of the biggest gaps in homegrown stack workflows, where intermediate PRs can look green even though the eventual merge target would fail.

GitHub also says teams can merge all or only part of a stack. After a merge, the remaining PRs are automatically rebased so the lowest unmerged PR points at the correct branch. For teams already familiar with tools like Graphite or Meta’s older ghstack approach, the important signal is not the concept itself but GitHub bringing that concept into the native UI and merge flow.

What to watch next

The preview is still early, so the real test is whether the workflow holds up under strict branch protection, merge queues, and cross-team review habits. Even so, the launch suggests that GitHub now sees stacked changes as a mainstream review pattern rather than an expert-only workaround. It is also notable that the docs include an AI agent integration path through npx skills add github/gh-stack, implying that GitHub expects both humans and coding agents to create, navigate, and maintain stacks as a normal part of day-to-day development.