How stacked PRs work behind the scenes at GitHub | S02E05 | The GitHub Podcast

In episode 5 of season 2 of The GitHub Podcast, Cassidy and Andrea welcome Sameen Karim, Senior Product Manager at GitHub, to discuss native stacked pull requests. Sameen shares how GitHub rebuilt legacy merge box systems, handled "ghost merges" across linked PR chains, and closed code owner security loopholes. Learn how engineering teams use stacks to break large features into smaller, reviewable PRs, and explore the open source gh-stack CLI. Links mentioned in this episode: GitHub Universe: https://githubuniverse.com/?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=podcastgh_uni_26 Sarah Drasner's code drawings: https://sarah.dev/projects/ AGENTS.md: https://github.com/agentsmd/agents.md gh-stack CLI: https://github.com/github/gh-stack — CHAPTERS — 00:00 Welcome to The GitHub Podcast 01:16 Sameen's path to GitHub 02:13 What are stacked pull requests? 06:41 The long road to stacked PRs 13:10 Core architectural decisions 17:31 Benefits of native stacked PRs 23:41 Adopting stacked PR workflows 28:09 Future of stacked PRs & PR experience 31:55 Ubiquitous access & developer choice 33:34 Community feedback & project picks #GitHub #GitHubPodcast #PullRequest Stay up-to-date on all things GitHub by connecting with us: YouTube: https://gh.io/subgithub Blog: https://github.blog X: https://twitter.com/github LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/github Insider newsletter: https://resources.github.com/newsletter/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/github TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@github About GitHub It’s where over 180 million developers create, share, and ship the best code possible. It’s a place for anyone, from anywhere, to build anything—it’s where the world builds software. https://github.com