Ayo GitHub Quietly Killed the Unreviewable Mega-PR

If you've ever opened a PR with 47 changed files and a diff so long GitHub just gives up and shows you "Load Diff" seventeen times, this one's for you. GitHub quietly shipped what might be the biggest pull request update in years, and it's aimed squarely at that problem. Let's talk about stacked pull requests. The problem, in one sentence Big PRs are where good reviews go to die. Nobody reads a 2000 line diff carefully. Some folks reach for AI code review tools like LiveReview to take the edge off, and honestly that helps, but even the best reviewer (human or model) does a better job on a tight, focused diff than on a 2000 line wall. Smaller inputs, better reviews. That's true no matter who's doing the reviewing. Stacked PRs are GitHub's answer: break one massive change into a chain of small, dependent PRs, where each one only reviews the diff it actually introduces, not everything below it. What a stack actually is The rule is simple. You need two or more PRs in the same repo where: The bottom PR targets your trunk branch (usually main ) Every PR after that targets the PR below it, not main That's it. That's the whole trick. Foundational stuff (schemas, shared types) goes at the bottom. Stuff that depends on it (API routes, UI) goes higher up the chain. And here's the part that surprised me: if you just do this manually with plain git, by opening PR #11 against the branch for PR #10 instead of against main , GitHub now recognizes that as a stack automatically. No special tool required. It just notices the base branches form a chain and lights up a banner. Stacking isn't a git concept at all, it's purely a GitHub UI concept layered on top of branches you were already making. Let's actually build one Enough theory. I built a real stack in one of my own repos ( peektea , a terminal file browser I maintain), using a harmless scratch file so nothing real got touched. Here's the actual terminal session, copy pasted, warts and all. First I tried to be fancy and use the CL