Ask HN: Is the GitHub pancake menu now a pancake emoji?

Apparently it is meant as an easter egg/announcement of the new stacked pull requests feature (https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/how-tos/stacked-pul...), but with GitHub's gradual quality degradation and nothing denoting that in the tooltip it just looks like their icon font is malfunctioning.

Looks like an easter egg for Stacked Pull Requests.

https://gh.io/stacks

Discussion:

Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112232

Relevant discussion https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/203497

my guess: their new-ish "PR stacks" feature?

edit: yes i bet it's https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-30-stacked-pull-reques...

Oh man. I just assumed this was unchecked Microslop.

It's funny when a brand doesn't realize how the public has started perceiving them and makes quite ironic choices that should have been caught well before they went to the public eye.

My train of thought was:

  - LLMs way over-use emojis
  - Replacing a standard icon with a look-alike emoji was probably an LLM mistake
  - From a company that has been pushing sloppy AI hard. 
  - Must be Microslop!

They should have either used a custom picture that wouldn't be mistaken for slop, or they should have more clearly called out why they changed it. For me, even now that I know it is supposed to be an easter-egg, it just feel like slop.

I always thought it was a hamburger

I would also love to know

haha literally why is it a pancake

Yes

hungry for pancakes now

so cute