4 Dominant Themes in the Stacked‑PR Discussion
| Theme | Key Take‑aways | Representative Quotes |
|---|---|---|
| 1️⃣ Monorepo & cross‑repo coordination | Stacked PRs are valuable when work must be merged in a specific order—e.g., in monorepos or when several dependent repositories need to be released together. | • “Seems to mainly be useful for monorepos as currently designed. Or, to replace a long‑lived feature/refactor branch.” – ZeWaka • “Exact problem we’ve run into at work. We’ve ended up having to write external merge coordination in order to not break our dev deployments.” – ZeWaka |
| 2️⃣ Granular, reviewer‑focused workflow | The main benefit is being able to split a large change into smaller, independently reviewable PRs, letting different reviewers focus only on the code they care about and reducing diff noise. | • “We could make a backend repository MR depend on a library repository MR, and even enable auto‑merge that’d fire when the backend MR was reviewed and the dependency was also merged.” – Hamuko • “If only there were some way to logically break up large pull requests into smaller pieces… some way to ‘commit’ a change to the record of the repository…” – noident |
| 3️⃣ CLI / AI‑agent integration | A GitHub CLI (and related “skill” files) makes creating and managing stacks easy, especially for automated agents that can generate a whole stack of dependent PRs automatically. | • “We're shipping a skill file with the CLI … Everyone will have their own way of structuring stacks, but I've found it great for the agent to plan a stack structure that mirrors the work to be done.” – sameenkarim • “I have had a lot of success with Claude and jj … The CLI will make it a lot easier for AI agents to drive stacked PRs.” – steveklabnik |
| 4️⃣ Mixed reception & criticism | While many welcome the feature, several commentators question its necessity, compare it unfavorably to existing tools (Gerrit, Phabricator, GitLab), or warn about added complexity/over‑engineering. | • “I have never understood what this even means… If they’re not [orthogonal], why do you want to review them independently?” – ninkendo • “Stacked diffs were first done in the Linux kernel… The ‘pull request’ term is from git; git itself was built to accommodate earlier concepts of mailing patches around.” – js2 |
All quoted text is taken verbatim from the discussion, with HTML entities escaped.