Stacked PRs: what they are and how to run CI on a stack

Stacked pull requests divide large, dependent changes into smaller PRs that build on one another, improving review focus and allowing development to continue while earlier work is reviewed, but they can also multiply CI runs when updates to lower branches require rebasing and revalidating later ones. GitHub introduced general availability for stacked PRs in October 2026, while CircleCI recommends reducing redundant validation through parent-branch-based path filtering, test impact analysis, dynamic test splitting, and Dynamic Parallelism to scale compute resources to selected tests. The article also suggests catching routine failures before code is pushed with Chunk sidecars and helping coding agents diagnose CI failures through consolidated reports and agent integrations. Despite these optimizations, each PR should retain checks appropriate to its own changes, especially where shared components or service interactions are involved. Stacked PRs are most useful for large changes that can be independently understood and reviewed, while small changes or features requiring full-context review may be better handled in a single PR.

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