GitHub Copilot app gets stacked sessions and stacked pull requests
GitHub Copilot app now supports stacked sessions and stacked pull requests—chains of successive tasks and PRs within a repository. GitHub demonstrated the feature using the example of modernizing a ten-year-old app with Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.
GitHub Blog described a new feature in GitHub Copilot app called stacked sessions and stacked pull requests. A stacked session is a series of successive actions (sessions) within a single repository, where each subsequent session builds on the result of the previous one. A stacked pull request is a similar series of pull requests, where each targets the branch of the previous one, creating an ordered chain of changes.
The author of the post demonstrated the feature on his own personal project, which was more than ten years old (a dashboard for calendars, smart home devices, and task management) and used React 15, the Less preprocessor, and an old version of the react-bootstrap library. He used Plan mode in Copilot to plan the frontend modernization, Claude Opus 4.8 generated the code itself, and he had GPT-5.5 check the resulting plan through a so-called rubber duck review.
During the work, he encountered a problem with the wrong target branch—the changes were supposed to be applied to the dev branch, not main. According to the author, Copilot was able to create a new session, close the incorrectly created pull request, and transfer the styling changes to the correct branch. The author then discovered outdated warnings from the react-bootstrap library in the console and considered in Plan mode whether to replace it or just upgrade it. To avoid creating a single large pull request, he split this work into a separate follow-up (stacked) session and pull request for replacing react-bootstrap, linked to the branch of changes that had already been created.
You can find details in the source article.
Why it matters
For developers assigning large tasks such as modernizing old code to AI agents, the feature offers a way to split the result into smaller, successive pull requests instead of one bundle of changes that is difficult to review. This makes code review and gradual deployment easier and, according to the author, also helps prevent the scope of the task from expanding uncontrollably during agent work (scope creep).
Two audiences, two different impacts
What this means
For individuals
A developer using GitHub Copilot app can break a large task, such as modernizing an old frontend, into a chain of successive sessions and pull requests instead of waiting for one huge result that is then difficult to review.
For a business
Teams using GitHub Copilot can incorporate this feature into the code review process for large AI-assisted refactoring projects, as stacked pull requests reduce the risk of excessively large changes that are difficult to review.
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