Stacked Diffs can be expensive: Why you should do it more

Stacked diffs are a Git workflow that divides a large feature into a sequence of small, dependent pull requests, allowing each change to be reviewed, tested, and merged independently while development continues on later parts of the feature. Advocates argue that this approach reduces context switching, encourages more detailed reviews, and ensures each commit passes continuous integration checks, which can simplify debugging and regression analysis. Although stacked branches can be managed manually with Git, updating a lower branch requires rebasing dependent branches and resolving any resulting conflicts, a process that becomes difficult for longer stacks. Tools such as Graphite automate branch restacking, pull-request submission, conflict handling, visualization, and synchronization with the main branch. The approach can also increase CI usage and costs because each small pull request and restack may trigger additional workflows, leading the text to suggest selectively running checks through CI configuration or using faster, lower-cost CI infrastructure.

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