Stacked Diffs in Cursor Origin: The Review Model

Graphite defines a stacked diff as "a series of related code changes organized into distinct, incremental patches, each built on top of the previous one." Instead of one large pull request, you open several small ones, where each depends on the change below it. The bottom of the stack branches off main; everything above builds on it.

The problem this solves is the monolithic PR. A 1,200-line change is hard to review well, so it sits, and people rubber-stamp it. Graphite's argument is that breaking the work into self-contained segments lets a reviewer "grok a smaller patch without needing to mentally parse a broad swath of unrelated changes."

Graphite's command-line tool, gt, is what makes stacks practical. Three commands do most of the work, and they map directly onto how you'd build a feature in pieces.

The command that earns its keep is gt restack. When you change PR 2 near the bottom, everything above it needs to be rebased so the stack stays consistent. Doing that by hand across four branches is the tedious part stacks are accused of; gt restack is the answer to it.

Two things change. First, you review each PR as if it were an independent change, and when you're tagged on several, you start at the bottom of the stack, closest to main, and work up. Second, you have to relax a couple of GitHub settings that fight stacks.

There is an honest cost to name. Splitting one change into five PRs adds coordination: a reviewer sometimes has to connect the pieces across the stack to see the whole. Graphite's framing is that smaller, faster reviews are worth that overhead. For most high-throughput teams it is, but it is a trade, not a free win.

Agents already produce work in the shape stacks want: many small, related changes, fast. A single agent task often becomes a migration, then a model, then an endpoint, each depending on the last. That is a stack. And gt create --ai can name the branch and write the commit message, which removes a chore that multiplies when changes are small and frequent.

This is the clearest line between Graphite and Origin. Origin is built by the Graphite team, so stacked review is almost certainly central to it. How deeply Origin bakes stacks in, versus running gt against GitHub the way you can today, is the part to confirm when Origin ships.