Stacked pull requests and squash merges don't mix

This week I had a few chains of stacked pull requests open on a side project. I squash-merged the first PR in one chain, opened the second, and GitHub said it had conflicts. In files that PR never changed. Then the same thing happened to the third PR, and the fourth. This post is what was going on, how I got out of it, and what I do differently now....

October 23, 2026