Jon Moshier / Notes / Stacked Diffs seedling
Note · From the Notebook

Stacked Diffs

A review workflow that breaks one large change into a chain of small, dependent pull requests that review and merge in sequence.

[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.

Stacked diffs decompose a big change into a stack of small PRs, each building on the one below it, so every unit stays small enough to review well while the whole feature still lands coherently. The practice comes from Phabricator and Google’s Critique and is now productized by tools like Graphite. It matters in the AI era because review cost scales worse than linearly with diff size, so when generation is cheap the winning move is many small reviewable changes rather than one large one. Seeded from Rebuilding Review and Deployment for the AI Era; pairs with Merge Queue and Trunk-Based Development.

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