> What's the benefit of this type of stacked PRs over a well-curated set of commits, and reviewing per commit?

For the people who work with stacked diffs (in phab/otherwise) this is exactly what they'd consider reviewing a well-curated set of commits one-by-one.

One distinction is that cognitively a unit of review (a PR, a diff) remains a single bound change. Comments are focused on that change and the PR does not grow with size of the feature

Another distinction is the ability to focus each part of the stack to a particular audience. One change may require review from an external team, another may be just your team mate, a third might be the consuming team. By focusing the stack to the different reviewers you can avoid ambiguity about "what a person is signing off on" in the stack.

aside: one thing that would be great for github reviews is the adoption of change ids such that comments persist across reviews with a rebase workflow.

I don't have experience with the stacked PR workflow and often find myself asking the same questions you are.

As far as I can tell, the biggest benefit of stacked PRs over just making a coherent series of commits, is that it might make it easier to start work on your second PR before you merge the first one?

With human-in-the-loop coding, that sounds like it could lead to a lot of wasted work if the first PR gets substantial feedback. But with agentic coding, I can imagine how it might be desirable to keep the agent chugging while the first PR is under review.

Interested in learning more about it and generally agree that AI is stressing the current review paradigms a lot of us are accustomed to.

> What's the benefit of this type of stacked PRs over a well-curated set of commits, and reviewing per commit?

What I can see is that you can easily append commits to e.g. the first PR in a stack, which would insert them into the middle of sequence of commits.

This will require rebasing and fixing the subsequent PRs in a stack the same way you'd need to rebase and fix the subsequent commits in a mega-PR. But it makes the right thing easy (keeping all the commits to the foundation of the change together) rather than makin the wrong thing easy (appending fixup commits across the entire change in a random order so that the actual foundational change is lost).

Keeping all the foundational commits together also keeps all the discussion over the foundational change together.

You could argue that you'd want to only do the foundational PR and stop, but doing the whole stack of PRs gives the reviewers more information about where you're going, and allows work to continue asynchronously.

> What's the benefit of this type of stacked PRs over a well-curated set of commits, and reviewing per commit?

Even if the reviewer does the review commit-by-commit, all the comments and discussions will be on the same PR leading to multiple ongoing conversations about different topics that would be split if the PR are stacked. Also, all the new commits addressing the comments with spoil this commit-by-commit design, as the previous commits will be outdated and the new changes will be on top of those. I think it's beneficial for new changes to be a separate commit and not rewriting history, to not force the reviewers to re-read everything but just the latest changes.

It’s the “well-curated” part. Many folks treat commits like video game save points, and find providing any kind of message burdensome (e.g. “fix bug”, “do work”). This alone is fine, but then they can’t be bothered to go back and clean it up with `git rebase -i`, so you end up with a mountain of trash in your git log if you don’t turn on mandatory squash and merge. For these folks, the PR becomes the commit. Stacked PRs is revolutionary because it’s as though these developers can finally have multiple commits which comprise a change.

You can’t merge one commit at a time in a PR. In a stack, if the first 4 parts of a feature are good to go and there’s a problem with the 5th, the whole thing doesn’t need to be blocked.

With stacking you can continue working on a longer change while creating reviewable diffs. Merged diffs can be rebased on your HEAD. For teams that support stacked diffs you don't usually even need to manage branches and work directly off trunk and rebase changes as they come in

I would say that it makes it easier to design a PR and then go back and update that PR as things evolve. For instance, you might decide you need one table so your first PR in the stack adds that table. But then you finish up with 2 or 3 more PRs and you get reviewed and you and your colleagues decide to add a 2nd table. Now you get to go back to that first PR, add the 2nd table and then you get to cleanly review that 2nd table. Then each PR in the stack also gets a clean small addition to handle the table, that can be reviewed in its own context with smaller diffs.

So the idea is you can much more cleanly isolate changes for large features.

I've had that same "what's the point" thought every time I've read about stacked PRs, but recently had an (obvious) epiphany. The benefit is you get CI for each commit! I've always hated fixup/typo/fix tests commits and toyed with having a CI check that enforced ci passing on each commit but this drops that need.

I feel it's more of a limitation of the GitHub UI. It is much easier to group together reviews and comments by PR than it is by commits.

it's basically a UI for a well-curated set of commits, and reviewing per commit.

1. Github's UI doesn't really support reviewing individual commits in a big PR.

2. It also can't merge subsets of commits from a single PR. E.g. if you have two commits, A and B, where B depends on A... sure you can make a PR containing A and B, but if A gets approved and B doesn't, then you can't merge A.

3. The thing you want to do with a set of commits and reviewing each commit IS stacked PRs.

This is nothing to do with AI.

[dead]

I think it is designed for AI Pull Requests. My impression was that it's for reviewing large generated changes.