GitHub Copilot Launches Stacked Sessions: A Real-World Test Refactoring a 10-Year-Old Codebase
GitHub Blog AI/ML · rss · 2026-07-31
The GitHub Copilot app recently introduced "Stacked Sessions," allowing multiple tasks to be chained within the same repository. The context and changes from a previous session directly feed into the next, automatically generating stacked Pull Requests.
The author shared a hands-on experience using this feature to modernize a 10-year-old personal project:
- Task Breakdown: Facing severely outdated dependencies (e.g., React 15), the author used Plan mode to let AI evaluate and formulate a modernization plan.
- Context Flow: Upon discovering branch misalignment or needing to pivot, Copilot seamlessly closed failed PRs and ported existing styling decisions to a new target branch.
- Controlling Scope Creep: To avoid generating massive, unreviewable 10,000-line PRs, the author used stacked sessions to split "frontend styling updates" and "replacing the deprecated react-bootstrap library" into two interdependent PRs.
This workflow of nesting session contexts and code branches significantly reduces the cognitive load of maintaining legacy code, showcasing a new paradigm for AI coding tools in complex engineering refactoring.
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