A Practical Guide to Using Stacked Pull Requests for Cleaner Code Reviews

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Stacked pull requests (PRs) are a development technique where a chain of branches each targets the one below it rather than the main branch, allowing large changes to be reviewed in smaller, focused layers. The approach is designed to reduce reviewer cognitive load — for example, a 1,400-line change can be split into four PRs of roughly 350 lines each. Developers benefit by maintaining momentum, as they can continue building on upper layers while lower ones are still under review. However, the method is not universally applicable: small bug fixes, unrelated changes, or teams without an established stacked-PR workflow should avoid it. The GitHub CLI extension 'gh stack' supports the workflow with commands to initialize, view, and submit stacked PRs from a single repository.

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