The way github does PRs is great for open source projects where you have submissions from a very diverse set of developers. You need to evaluate the whole PR as whole and accept it or reject it.

But it is not ideal where you have a small team working on single product. The PR review becomes a gate and it has been my experience as a developer that you spend a LOT of time trying to get your PR reviewed.

My preferred approach is to do smaller and more frequent commits that are merged directly to the main branch. Developers learn to break a problem into very small changes which is a skill by itself. It is the responsibility of a lead or Sr engineer to check the commits as they come so they can provide feedback as soon as possible. This was the spirit of the original continuous integration ideas back in the day.

Why would I want to build on changes that haven't been reviewed and accepted? That's a good way to waste my time having to redo something because the foundation it was based on was flawed and got rejected later.

There's a reason git and most accepted development workflows are linear.

I also appreciate the ordering. In my projects, we put an extra focus on tests by having having a commit that adds new tests to reproduce the bad behavior so when you diff the tests with the fix commit, you get a visual of how things changed.

I also find that the order can be PR specific. I wonder about allowing the contributor or reviewrs reorder on per-PR basis.

There are also times we have a lot of test or doc changes. I wonder about grouping items to jump between or collapsing to more easily navigate around than opening and browsing a file picker.

Though if it can just make stacked PRs widespread, I'd already be very happy.

I haven't signed up, but I'm not convinced the stacked PR's is a good route. This is mostly because I'm thinking about it in terms of how I work now, so maybe after a trial run I would see it differently. My experience with launching software is people don't want to change their workflows.

So the way I imagine how this would get used by real accounts is they will still review individual PR's and merge them in like normal and avoid doing stacked PR's because a lot of us mostly care about the final result and less about the how you got there.

That is until we need to understand the how lol So being able to visualize this is probably a very useful tool for retroactive inspection over being part of the PR review workflow.

I hope the author doesn't feel like I'm dunking on them, I really love the idea of re-thinking PR.

Maybe this tool would help, but nothing in this pitch convinces me.

[0] https://ersc.io/

Right now there are effectively three ways to do a PR:

- a bunch of small commits, some of them related to the feature, some fixes, some mixing both -> a PR with 'n' commits -> they don't really make sense as atomic commits, you have to review the entire PR to make the sense of it

- a squashed PR

- some uber principled reorganisation of commits that separates key implementation concerns into smaller commits (effectively stacked PRs but clean)

The last option would be desirable but it's unreasonable to expect anyone to do it by hand. So this is where <maybe> an LLM could parse my garbage intermediate commits, the final diff and generate a stack instead?

I've got some wheels spare, care to have some?

The file priority thing is a great idea too. That would be even more useful for search. The number of times I'm searching for something on Github and it just shows me a gazillion tests.... Yeah you can look up their advanced search syntax and exclude them probably, but it's always a hassle.