Jeremy Gaddis
jg.gg · Personal blog · on HN since 2016
Jeremy Gaddis writes about software workflows, coding interviews and agentic coding, including a well-known post on stacked diffs.
What HN saysHN commenters repeatedly link his 2018 post on stacked diffs versus pull requests to explain that workflow, though one reader found it hard to follow.
16HN people shared it
7linked it in comments
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Most-shared posts
- 1Stacked Diffs versus Pull Requests12 people · 151 points · first shared 2018 · 73 comments on HN
- 2Cord didn't win. What now?1 people · 65 points · first shared 2025 · 59 comments on HN
- 3The Knowledge Chipper: An Agentic Coding Story1 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 4Real Gs Move in Silence Like Alignment1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 5Coding Interview Problem: Least Disruptive Subrange [video]1 people · 1 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
steveklabnik · 2023-11-21
I know people who express similar feelings. Usually it is shorthand for "I would prefer stacked diffs" or similar.
Two blog posts I've seen people point at:
* https://mitchellh.com/writing/github-changesets
* https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
joaoqalves · 2022-10-08
Relevant link:
* Stacked diffs vs Pull Requests [1]
1 - https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
allen-munsch · 2022-08-27
There's a nice article here: https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
da39a3ee · 2022-03-22
I have to admit I’m struggling with this. I know git and PR-based workflows inside out. But I’m trying to read https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/ and the penny hasn’t dropped at all. Nowadays github has a “squash abd merge” button; it’s unclear how many of the points in the article would be addressed by that.
tomasreimers · 2021-11-17
Probably because you're trying to break up your changes. Two good blog posts that talk about this workflow are:
https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
and
https://kurtisnusbaum.medium.com/stacked-diffs-keeping-phabricator-dif…
codesuki · 2021-04-24
Maybe I am just too dumb but I always found pull requests hard for making small commits. Somehow PRs always ended up being on the bigger end. We even tried these stacked PRs but it was quite confusing.
In the end we moved to Gerrit and never looked back. We are not super experienced yet but I'd say our commit quality went up by quite a bit.
This is a good introduction to the differences of stacked diffs vs PRs: https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/
terapixel · 2018-10-29
Of the choices that he proposes, #2 seems like the obvious solution to me - but he writes it off as too difficult.
Phabricator’s stacked diffs [0] works wonderfully well to support this exact workflow (it isn’t clear from the post which versioning system the author uses and what workflows it supports - maybe I missed it?)
[0] https://jg.gg/2018/09/29/stacked-diffs-versus-pull-requests/