Big pull requests are painful. They take too long to review, mistakes slip through, and AI coding agents now make them even bigger. Stacked pull requests are GitHub's answer, and they entered public preview on July 30, 2026.
In this deck I explain what stacked PRs are: a chain of small PRs in one repository, where each PR targets the branch below it and the whole stack lands on main. I walk through the three steps - build the stack, review each layer on its own using the stack map, then merge one, some, or all of them while the PRs above are rebased and retargeted for you.
I also cover how your quality bar stays the same (branch protection and required checks still apply), where you can use this (github.com, GitHub CLI, mobile, and the Copilot app), and a case study of modernizing a 10-year-old React front end with stacked sessions instead of one 10,000-line PR.
Try it now: gh extension install github/gh-stack