I spend a lot of time thinking about stacked pull requests. As the founder of Graphite, I’ve seen how this developer workflow has grown more and mor

Stacking and Agentic PRs Go Hand in Hand - by Greg Foster

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2024-12-13 21:30:06

I spend a lot of time thinking about stacked pull requests. As the founder of Graphite, I’ve seen how this developer workflow has grown more and more popular—originally popularized internally at Facebook, and now adopted by thousands of fast-moving teams. The idea is simple: instead of working on large, monolithic pull requests, you break changes into a series of small, incremental PRs that build on top of each other. It’s a method designed to help teams move quickly without sacrificing the quality and clarity that comes with smaller chunks of code.

At the same time, I’m watching with a mix of excitement and caution as a new trend emerges: AI-generated pull requests. Several companies are racing to build “self-driving PRs,” where autonomous systems read your entire codebase, understand outstanding tasks, and start submitting their own PRs—like tireless open-source contributors who never sleep and never lose focus. In theory, this could dramatically reduce the manual time developers spend writing boilerplate code, hunting down bugs, or implementing repetitive features.

What intrigues me is how these two trends—stacked PRs and AI-generated PRs—might intersect. How does the workflow of tomorrow look when we blend the human pattern of stacking with the robotic efficiency of machine-generated pull requests?

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