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



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