Stacked Diffs

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

Stacked diffs are what happens when you refuse to let one giant pull request hold a whole feature hostage. Instead of one 2,000-line PR that takes a reviewer three days to work up the courage to open, you split the work into a chain of small PRs, each one building directly on top of the last, each reviewable on its own, each mergeable the moment it's approved without waiting for the whole chain to finish.

Real Talk

Stacked diffs, or stacked PRs, is a workflow where a large change is broken into a linear sequence of small, dependent commits or pull requests, each based on the previous one in the stack, allowing each layer to be reviewed and merged independently while tooling automatically rebases the remaining stack as earlier layers land. Tools like Graphite and Sapling, along with Phabricator's original arc workflow, were built specifically to manage the rebasing and dependency tracking that makes stacks painful to maintain by hand in plain git.

When You'll Hear This

"Break that into stacked diffs, nobody's reviewing a 2,000-line PR in one sitting." / "The bottom of the stack merged, so the rest auto-rebased on main."