Change Stack

Documentation Index

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Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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Overview

Change Stack takes any pull request and reorganizes it into a small number of independent change cohorts — logical groupings of related work — each broken into ordered layers that reflect the natural reading order of the change. Every layer anchors to specific line ranges in the diff, each with its own summary. Reviewers open Change Stack from the Review Change Stack → button that CodeRabbit posts in the comment. Inside, they navigate cohorts and layers with the keyboard, drop inline comments against specific ranges, and submit a GitHub review without leaving the Change Stack tab.

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Why Change Stack

AI-assisted development has made pull requests larger and more frequent, a single AI-authored change can touch dozens of files across multiple layers of a codebase. GitHub’s or IDE’s default diff view presents those files alphabetically, without reflecting the logical dependencies between them. Change Stack reorganizes the diff into cohorts and layers that reflect the structure of the change:

• Cohorts group related files and hunks that belong together conceptually.
• Layers order those groups so foundational changes (data shapes, contracts) come before the code that depends on them (consumers, call sites, tests).
• Range summaries explain each contiguous block of changed lines in plain language.
• Diagrams are generated inline for layers where a visual earns its place — sequence diagrams for new call flows, state machines for lifecycle changes, ERDs for data model updates. Layers that do not warrant a diagram do not get one.

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Opening Change Stack

Every PR review comment from CodeRabbit includes a Review Change Stack → button above the standard walkthrough. Clicking it opens the PR in the Change Stack interface. Change Stack is opt-in per reviewer. Teammates who prefer the default GitHub review experience can ignore the button — nothing about the PR workflow changes for them.

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The three-panel layout

Change Stack uses a fixed three-panel layout tuned for rapid navigation:

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Keyboard navigation

Change Stack is designed to be driven from the keyboard: Reviewers can also switch between unified and split diff views, toggle line wrapping, and step through the review order using the arrow controls in the diff header.

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Reviewing in Change Stack

Change Stack supports the same review primitives as GitHub — marking files as viewed, leaving inline comments, accumulating a draft review, and submitting an approval, request-changes, or comment verdict. Reviews post back to GitHub natively, so comments and approvals land exactly where your team expects them.

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Inline comments

Every range summary in the right panel has an Add block comment action that opens a comment against the exact line range covered by the summary. Comments accumulate into a pending review, which you submit from the Submit review menu in the top-right corner.

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Files viewed

Marking a file as viewed in Change Stack syncs with GitHub’s Viewed state on the same file, so your progress is visible to other reviewers and persists if you switch back to the GitHub UI.

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Snapshots and stale-state protection

Every time the PR author pushes a new commit, Change Stack generates a new snapshot of the change and retains previous ones. A snapshot dropdown in the header lets reviewers switch between snapshots to answer the question “what changed since I last looked?” — even across rebases and force-pushes.

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Access and permissions

Change Stack authenticates with a repo-scoped GitHub OAuth grant and preserves your return path through SSO, so links work end-to-end even on organizations with enforced SSO. Public-link sharing is supported within the limits of the underlying GitHub repository’s access controls — a reviewer without access to the repo will not be able to open the Change Stack.

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What’s next