gh stack checkout only works for formal stacks

Open

#515 opened on Sep 18, 2026 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty: 3/5
Estimated time: 1-2 days
Newbie friendliness: 68/100

Issue type: Bug
Clarity: Mostly clear
Activity status: Active
Tech stack: github, go
Domain: cli

Research direction

Start at the gh stack checkout command and trace how it determines whether PR #12345 belongs to a formal stack, then inspect how gh pr checkout handles ordinary pull requests. Done means gh stack checkout falls back to the ordinary checkout behavior for a PR that is not in a stack, with the expected notice shown.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary

It seems GitHub, and by consequent the gh and gh stack CLI behaviors, have two different mental models for what a "PR" is: one must now use gh pr checkout 12345 if it is a normal PR and gh stack checkout 12345 if it is part of a GH Stack

Then gh stack checkout does not simply fall back to the gh pr checkout behavior if the given PR number is not part of a formal stack

That places the burden upon any automation, or reviewers, to have an if statement which either looks up the condition of the PR or does an actual if ! gh stack checkout $num; then gh pr checkout $num; fi work-around

Expected Behavior

$ gh stack checkout 12345
✗ PR #12345 is not part of a stack on GitHub, using $(gh pr checkout) instead
remote: Enumerating objects: 11, done.
...etc

Dominant language: Go
Stars: 1.5k
Forks: 73
Avg merge: 1d 8h
Merged PRs (30d): 7

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