Team Adoption

Code review slows down as PRs get bigger. Reviewers spend less time per line as the diff grows: a 400-line PR gets a thorough review, a 2,000-line PR gets a skim and an approval.

As teams adopt AI coding tools, the amount of code generated per developer is increasing faster than anyone can review it. Stacked PRs let developers ship large changes as a series of small, reviewable units instead of one monolith.

The difference shows up in practice:

• Faster review cycles: small PRs get reviewed in hours, not days

• Higher review quality: reviewers catch more issues in focused diffs

• Faster unblocking: developers can start the next piece while the first is in review

• Easier rollbacks: revert one small PR instead of unwinding a monolith

Stacks doesn’t require a team-wide rollout. There’s no repo-wide configuration, no CI changes, and no admin setup.

A single developer can start using stacks today:

1. Install the CLI locally
2. Run mergify stack setup in their clone
3. Start pushing stacks

Their teammates review the resulting PRs normally. They just see smaller, well-organized PRs with stack comments explaining the chain. No one else needs to install anything.

As more developers see the benefits in review, adoption spreads naturally.

Not every change needs a stack. Use stacks when the alternative is a large, hard-to-review PR:

Good candidates:

• Features touching multiple layers (model, API, UI)
• Large refactors that can be broken into logical steps
• AI-generated changes that need careful human review
• Any change that would exceed ~300 lines in a single PR

Skip stacks for:

• One-line bug fixes
• Documentation-only changes
• Simple configuration updates
• Changes that are already small and focused

Merge Queue complements Stacks well: Stacks break large changes into reviewable pieces, and Merge Queue lands those pieces safely and efficiently. Each stacked PR can enter the queue independently as its dependencies land. The bottom PR merges first, then the next one enters the queue, and so on, without manual coordination.

Several tools offer stacked PRs. Here’s how Mergify Stacks compares:

Mergify Stacks uses standard Git. You don’t learn new commands for committing or managing branches. You use git commit, git rebase, and git commit --amend like you always have. Stacks handles the GitHub side.