Summary: GitHub put stacked pull requests into public preview on July 30, 2026, as a platform-level capability that preserves existing reviews, checks, and merge requirements. A stack contains ordered, focused PRs that can be reviewed in parallel and merged layer by layer or together. The article frames the feature as a way to keep review pace with large, AI-assisted changes.
GitHub announced on July 30, 2026 that stacked pull requests have entered public preview, with availability spreading to all repositories over the following days. The capability sits at the platform level rather than arriving as an extension: the reviews, checks, and merge requirements you already depend on keep working exactly as they did. What does change is that a large piece of work is no longer forced to squeeze itself into one giant pull request.
What a Stacked PR Is
A stack is a series of pull requests held in order, and each of them stands for one focused layer of the change. The model answers two long-standing complaints: the lone enormous PR that takes forever to review, and the chore of juggling several branches by hand with rebasing that never ends. GitHub positions stacks as a way to keep big changes moving — narrowly scoped pull requests get reviewed in parallel, and they can be merged one at a time, in part, or all at once, whether that means the entire stack together or individual layers as each becomes ready. Adopting stacks lets a team examine short, focused pull requests side by side and then land the whole set together.
Getting Started: CLI Extension and the gh-stack Skill
Everything begins with a single command: gh extension install github/gh-stack. GitHub says your first stack is under a minute away — begin with one branch and pull request for the initial change, then stack further branches and pull requests on top, with each pull request targeting the layer beneath it. Stacks are available on github.com, in the GitHub CLI, and in the mobile app, and coding agents such as GitHub Copilot can assemble stacks through the gh-stack skill. When AI is producing code in large volumes, that route is plainly a design priority.
Layer-by-Layer Review and One-Click Merging
During review you open any pull request in the stack and see the diff for that one layer alone, with a stack map at the top placing it within the larger body of work. Different teammates can take different layers in parallel and never block one another. Since each layer is an ordinary pull request, the reviews, branch protections, and required checks your team already enforces continue to apply — quality gates hold at every step of the stack, not only at the final merge to main. Merging comes in two granularities: merging the latest ready pull request lands that layer along with every unmerged layer beneath it in a single operation, whereas merging a lower layer leaves the pull requests above it open, automatically rebased and retargeted. Merge queue support is arriving progressively over the coming weeks.
Feedback from Large Codebases
The testers assembled in the changelog carry real weight. Tim Neutkens, Next.js lead at Vercel, reported that his team has spent the past few months building larger features as smaller individual changes with GitHub stacked PRs, which made PRs easier to review. John Resig, creator of jQuery, called the preview “incredible” — pushing five stacked PRs straight into a merge queue in one go. Andy Merryman, CTO of TED, put his finger on the core pain point: AI made developers dramatically more productive, and PRs swelled until reviewers could not keep up; carving changes into small, dependency-ordered pieces made reviews not merely faster but more accurate. A WHOOP engineer put it best: “It stopped feeling like a tool on top of GitHub and started feeling like GitHub.”
What It Changes for Development Workflow
The feature itself is not the only thing worth watching; so is the question of who is turning it into a default. Teams once propped up stacked-PR workflows with third-party tools and homegrown scripts, and folding them into the platform amounts to an official endorsement of small commits reviewed layer by layer. Place that beside the other trend of 2026 — coding agents emitting hundreds of lines per run while human reviewer attention turns into the bottleneck — and stacked PRs read as GitHub’s answer: slice agent output into dependency-ordered, reviewable layers so that review keeps pace with generation. The division of labor is stated plainly: agents produce the layers, humans approve them one by one. Feedback is being gathered through the stacks discussion while the preview runs. Should stacked PRs trace the path merge queues took from preview to standard equipment, the unit of code review may gradually shift from “a pull request” to “a stack.” Teams already reviewing in layers will notice the friction disappear; teams that were not have one less excuse for four-hundred-line pull requests.