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title: "GitHub Stacked PRs Turn Large Agent Changes Into Reviewable Chains"
description: "GitHub's stacked pull request preview gives large dependent code changes a native review path, which matters as agents produce broader diffs."
retrieval_nugget: "GitHub's stacked pull request preview gives large dependent code changes a native review path, which matters as agents produce broader diffs. GitHub's stacked pull requests preview gives teams a native way to break one large code change into a chain of smaller dependent pull requests."
status: "published"
published_at: "2026-07-31"
updated_at: "2026-07-31"
record_date: "2026-07-31"
date_kind: "published_at"
topics: ["coding-agents","developer-tools","workflows","verification"]
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# GitHub Stacked PRs Turn Large Agent Changes Into Reviewable Chains

## Retrieval answer

GitHub's stacked pull request preview gives large dependent code changes a native review path, which matters as agents produce broader diffs. GitHub's stacked pull requests preview gives teams a native way to break one large code change into a chain of smaller dependent pull requests.

GitHub's stacked pull requests preview gives teams a native way to break one large code change into a chain of smaller dependent pull requests. The docs position the feature around review and mergeability: each pull request in the chain can be reviewed and merged independently.

That matters even more in agent-assisted development than in manual development. Agents are good at producing broad patches. Teams are still bottlenecked by understanding, reviewing, testing, and safely merging those patches. A stack makes the work legible: foundation change first, dependent change next, product surface after that.

GitHub's docs cover creating stacked pull requests with the `gh stack` extension or directly on GitHub, restructuring stacks, rebasing branches, merging from the bottom up, merging individually, merging contiguous groups, and optimizing GitHub Actions for stack-aware CI.

The important product move is that the stack is not a private convention hidden in branch names. It becomes a review object with documented CLI behavior, web review, merge strategy, and CI metadata.

## New Runtime Read

The scarce resource in coding-agent workflows is not code generation. It is review bandwidth.

Stacked PRs are a useful answer because they make a large agent output decomposable without pretending the pieces are independent. The better default for agent work is not "one giant PR with a heroic reviewer." It is a chain where each layer has its own diff, evidence, CI result, and merge decision.