---
title: "🥞 Main Branch: The One Where the Giant PR Gets Broken Up"
date: 2026-08-09
author: Andrea Griffiths
language: en
issue: 35
excerpt: "Stacked pull requests, Dependabot branch names, and benchmarking AGENTS.md files."
tags: ["pull-requests", "stacked-prs", "gh-stack", "dependabot", "open-source", "agent-plugins", "agents-md", "benchmarking", "nodejs", "newsletter"]
canonical_url: https://mainbranch.beehiiv.com/p/main-branch-the-one-where-the-giant-pr-gets-broken-up-issue-35
---

Hiya friends,

Next week I am in Atlanta, and most of what I have been reading lately is about whether the people holding up open source want to keep doing it. More on that below.

On the product side, stacked pull requests went into public preview. I ran them through a repo messy enough to tell me what they actually cost.

## 🚢 What Shipped

### [Stacked pull requests are in public preview](https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-30-stacked-pull-requests-are-now-in-public-preview/)

A stack is a chain of pull requests where each one targets the branch below it instead of `main`, so a reviewer gets one layer at a time instead of the whole change at once.

I rebuilt one fix as a three layer stack in a repo carrying 10 stale drafts and a test suite that failed because a Playwright test was sitting in the Jest directory. Test runners first, locale behavior second, browser coverage and CI third. GitHub rendered it as 3/3.

All three layers ran CI and CodeQL. Every pull request in a stack is evaluated against the stack's base, so your check minutes scale with stack depth. `github.event.pull_request.stack.position` and `.size` are exposed in workflow expressions, which is how you run the fast checks on every layer and hold the full suite for the top or the lowest unmerged one.

```bash
gh extension install github/gh-stack
```

### [Dependabot branch names are configurable](https://github.blog/changelog/2026-08-04-customize-dependabot-pull-request-branch-names/)

New `pull-request-branch-name` options in `.github/dependabot.yml` let you set a prefix, a maximum length, segment and word separators, letter case, or a full template.

```yaml
pull-request-branch-name:
  separator: "-"
  word-separator: "-"
  branch-name-case: "lowercase"
  max-length: 50
```

That turns `dependabot/npm_and_yarn/Lodash-4.17.21` into `dependabot-npm-and-yarn-lodash-4.17.21`. Useful if your CI enforces naming rules or length limits, or if you are in a monorepo where the default names blur together. Configure nothing and the defaults stay exactly as they are. Available on github.com now, and coming to GitHub Enterprise Server 3.23.

## 📖 What I'm Reading

**Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die)** by Mike McQuaid

I am lucky enough to call Mike a friend, and I have admired his career for a long time. He has run Homebrew for close to 17 years without burning out. He is fiercely protective of his maintainers and of the project, and he has managed that with class.

He opens on a call where maintainers were asked to raise a hand if the last six months beat the six before. His was the only hand in the air. His argument is that the scarce resource in open source is maintainer motivation, and money only buys time once there is enough of it to let someone cut their paid hours.

Worth your time if: you maintain anything with users, or you fund people who do.

[Read it](https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-must-be-fun-or-it-will-die/)

## 🔧 What I'm Using

[Agent Plugins](https://agent-plugins.org/) is now at 1.0.0, a vendor-neutral format for packaging skills and MCP servers, with core maintainers from Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel. A lot more agent guidance is about to get packaged and shipped around.

That is why I started building a GitHub Copilot plugin that benchmarks `AGENTS.md` files. It runs the same coding task with and without repository instructions, then compares the results across multiple runs, so you can tell whether the guidance is improving outcomes or just sounding helpful.

I will share it soon.

## ✨ This Week

I am speaking at Node.js Interactive on August 12 and 13, hosted inside RenderATL in downtown Atlanta. The OpenJS Foundation invited me and I'm very grateful for everything they do for the Node ecosystem. My talk is Node.js After the AI Shift: Building tools developers can trust, and I'm excited to be part of the first Node.js Interactive at RenderATL.

I was at the very first RenderATL and have spoken there since, and I keep going back for the room Justin Samuels and his team built. They publish the impact numbers every year, and it is past $55 million into Atlanta now. Don't sleep on this one. If you are there, please come say hello.

With gratitude,

I'll see you next week,

Andrea

## 📌 P.S.

I have two free tickets to RenderATL. If you want to be in Atlanta on August 12 and 13, hit reply and tell me. First come, first served.

## 💛 Support

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Sponsor: https://github.com/sponsors/AndreaGriffiths11