Review someone's stack

A teammate opened PR #142, and PR #142 is the top of a stack. You want to read the whole thing locally, bottom-up, with the parent edges intact.

What you'd otherwise do

Without sm, you'd manually walk the PR chain — find each PR's base ref, check it out, repeat:

gh pr view 142 --json baseRefName            # find the parent PR
gh pr checkout <parent-branch-name>
gh pr view <parent-pr-number> --json baseRefName
gh pr checkout <grandparent-branch-name>
# ...repeat down to trunk

Tedious, and you don't end up with parent metadata recorded — sm log won't render the tree.

With sm

sm get 142

What this does, in order:

1. gh pr view 142 --json baseRefName,headRefName to find the chain.
2. Walks the base_ref chain down to trunk.
3. gh pr checkout on each branch.
4. Records parent metadata (branch.<n>.stac-man-parent, -parent-sha).
5. Records the PR number on each branch (branch.<n>.stac-man-pr).
6. Leaves HEAD on the top branch.
7. Prints sm log.

Starting from PR #142, ending state

stac-man

main
└─ feat/db-schema  #140 merged
   └─ feat/api-endpoints  #141 open  CI ready
      └─ feat/web-form  ← current  #142 open  CI conflict

feat/web-form is the PR you want to review (HEAD is on it). CI conflict flags it as CONFLICTING on GitHub — typical when an ancestor has merged but the local chain hasn't been rebased onto trunk yet. Run sm sync to clean that up before reading the diff.

Now you can walk the chain bottom-up. Jump to the branch sitting directly on trunk (feat/db-schema):

sm bottom

Step up one branch (feat/api-endpoints):

sm up

And once more (feat/web-form):

sm up

Or jump directly:

sm checkout feat/api-endpoints

Each branch is real — you can run tests, set breakpoints, even commit fixups.

Reading the stack diff

sm show on each branch tells you the commits unique to that PR:

sm checkout feat/api-endpoints
sm show

If you want a single diff scoped to one layer (no parent commits):

git log --reverse --patch feat/db-schema..feat/api-endpoints

What sm get does NOT do

• It does not pull unsubmitted descendants. If the author has more branches stacked on top of feat/web-form locally that haven't been pushed, you won't see them.
• It does not run sm restack. Branches are checked out exactly as they exist on origin, even if origin's chain is "wrong" relative to current trunk.

Cleanup after review

When you're done reviewing, you can drop the stack from your local repo:

sm checkout main
git branch -D feat/web-form feat/api-endpoints feat/db-schema

Or use sm untrack --reparent if you want to keep the branches but drop them from sm's graph.

See also

• sm get — flag reference.
• sm submit — the inverse: push your own stack as PRs.
• Concepts → Parent metadata.