GitHub Rolls Out Stacked Pull Requests to Every Repository for Free

GitHub moved stacked pull requests into public preview on July 30, 2026, giving every repository free, native access to a workflow teams have long paid Graphite to get. Early testers named by GitHub include Vercel, jQuery, TED, and Whoop, and the launch lands as GitHub says AI coding agents are pushing commit volume toward 14 billion in 2026.

GitHub shipped stacked pull requests into public preview on July 30, 2026, making a workflow teams used to get from tools like Graphite native to the pull request page itself.

If you’ve ever split a big feature into a chain of dependent pull requests, you know the pain that follows. One reviewer approves the first PR, merges it, and every branch downstream needs a rebase. GitHub’s new feature hands that work to the platform itself: merge the first PR in a stack, and every PR above it rebases and retargets on GitHub’s own servers, automatically.

The workflow itself isn’t new. Developers have been stacking changes by hand with raw git for years, and a small market grew up to make it less miserable. Graphite built a business around bringing Meta and Google-style stacked diffs to GitHub teams, while the open-source tool ghstack has long been associated with workflows around large projects such as PyTorch. What’s new is that GitHub built the idea into GitHub. You can create a stack from the web interface, from GitHub CLI by installing the gh-stack extension, from the mobile app, or through a coding agent such as GitHub Copilot using the gh-stack skill. No waitlist. No enterprise tier. No browser extension for your reviewers to install.

GitHub’s own July 30 changelog named early testers including Vercel, jQuery, TED, and Whoop. John Resig, the creator of jQuery, called landing five stacked PRs directly to a merge queue at once “incredible.” Tim Neutkens, who leads Next.js at Vercel, said the feature helped his team “introduce smaller individual changes while shipping larger features.” Andy Merryman, TED’s CTO, said stacked PRs let the team review in “smaller logical chunks” and get stable code to ted.com faster. Mayank Saini, a connectivity engineer at Whoop, put it more bluntly: merging a whole stack in one shot made the workflow stop feeling like a tool on top of GitHub and start feeling like GitHub.

The feature entered private preview on April 13, 2026, before GitHub moved it into public preview. That timing tracks with a scaling problem GitHub has been talking about openly: the platform handled roughly one billion commits in 2025 and is on pace for about 14 billion in 2026, based on figures GitHub COO Kyle Daigle discussed on the Latent Space podcast. A review queue built for people doesn’t hold up when Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, and other coding agents start filing small changes by the dozen.

Stacked PRs give teams a way to break large, agent-written changes into smaller layers that a human can actually inspect. For Graphite, the stack map now lives inside GitHub’s own PR interface. Graphite still holds ground on collaboration on shared stacks, automated stack merging, a PR inbox, CI optimisation, and review tooling that GitHub’s first public preview doesn’t fully replace. GitHub’s documentation also says squash merging can leave you needing to sync the stack manually afterward. Merge queue support for stacks is rolling out progressively over the coming weeks, and existing branch protections and required checks still govern what actually lands on main.