GitHub Brings Stacked Pull Requests to Public Preview With New gh-stack CLI Extension

Overview

GitHub has moved stacked pull requests into public preview, rolling the feature out to all repositories alongside a new command-line extension, gh-stack, that lets developers build and manage stacks from the terminal. According to GitHub’s changelog post, the feature broke cover on July 30, 2026, and is described as breaking “large changes into small, reviewable pull requests” organized as “an ordered series of pull requests that each represent focused layers of your change.”

What We Know

Stacked pull requests let a developer base one pull request on another, forming a chain where each layer can be reviewed and, once the layers beneath it are merged, merged independently, according to GitHub’s changelog post. GitHub’s own description of the workflow states: “With stacks, you can independently review and check each pull request, then merge everything together in one click. No more opening a single large pull request that takes forever to review, or splitting work across multiple branches you have to keep manually rebasing.”

To get started, developers install the CLI extension with a single command, gh extension install github/gh-stack, and can then “create your first stack in under a minute,” per GitHub’s changelog post. Stacks can also be built and managed from github.com, the GitHub mobile app, or through GitHub Copilot using what GitHub calls the gh-stack skill.

Reviewers can open any pull request in a stack to see only the diff for that specific layer, using a “stack map” at the top of the pull request that shows how the change fits into the larger body of work, and different team members can review separate layers in parallel, GitHub says. On the merge side, landing the most recently approved pull request in a stack merges it and every unmerged layer beneath it in a single operation; merging only a lower layer leaves the pull requests above it open, automatically rebased and retargeted. GitHub says existing branch protections and required status checks still govern what reaches the main branch. Merge queue support for stacked pull requests is “rolling out progressively over the coming weeks,” while the public preview itself is rolling out to all repositories “over the coming days,” according to GitHub’s changelog post.

GitHub published testimonials from engineers at companies that used the feature ahead of the public rollout. Tim Neutkens, Next.js lead at Vercel, said in the changelog post: “We’ve been using GitHub stacked PRs for Next.js for the past few months. It has helped us introduce smaller individual changes while shipping larger features, making it easier to review PRs.” jQuery creator John Resig wrote that “Landing 5 stacked PRs directly to a merge queue all at once” cut down on friction, crediting the CLI tools and an agent skill for the improvement. TED CTO Andy Merryman said stacked pull requests addressed a bottleneck created by AI-assisted development: “AI has made TED’s developers dramatically more productive, but that created a new bottleneck: PRs were growing large enough that reviewers were struggling. Stacked PRs help to solve that.” WHOOP connectivity engineer Mayank Saini said the feature “stopped feeling like a tool on top of GitHub and started feeling like GitHub.”

The public rollout follows a private preview that DevClass reported on in April 2026, when the feature was still limited to select users. At that stage, GitHub’s Sameen Karim, who worked on the feature, told DevClass that “the CLI is completely optional, you can create stacked PRs purely via the UI.” Karim added on LinkedIn: “The bottleneck is no longer writing code – it’s reviewing it. Stacks help solve that.” DevClass noted the stack CLI was also designed for use by AI coding agents, according to Karim.

Stacked development is not a new idea. DevClass reported that the workflow traces back to Differential, a code-review tool created by Facebook’s Evan Priestley and Luke Shepard in 2007 and later folded into Facebook’s open-source Phabricator suite, released in 2011; Priestley said building the tool was motivated because “I was spending a lot of time waiting for code review to happen.” Open-source Phabricator ceased development in 2021, though a fork called Phorge remains actively maintained, DevClass reported. InfoQ reported that Meta popularized the “stacked diffs” approach through its internal tooling, and that companies including Graphite and Sapling have since built dedicated products around similar workflows.

Why It Matters

InfoQ framed the announcement as a response to a specific pressure point: “balancing the increasing speed of code generation, particularly with AI-assisted development, against the limited capacity of human code reviewers.” InfoQ noted that GitHub’s implementation “preserves existing branch protection rules, review workflows, and merge policies, making stacked development a natural extension of existing repository practices rather than requiring a separate workflow,” and that by building the capability directly into GitHub, Microsoft “removes much of the operational overhead” that previously pushed teams toward third-party tools such as Graphite.

What We Don’t Know

GitHub has not published a specific date for when merge queue support will finish rolling out, describing it only as “progressively over the coming weeks.” GitHub also has not said how the public preview rollout, described only as occurring “over the coming days,” is being sequenced across repositories, or when the feature might move beyond preview to general availability.