On March 25, 2026, the Magento Stammtisch Stuttgart took place – and I was there. Not in person, as I would have liked, but from home. A cold put a stop to my travel plans. Luckily, joining remotely was possible, so I was still able to give my talk about mage-remote-run ... quite a lot of "remote" :-)
Being there in person naturally has a different feel. The spontaneous conversations on the sidelines, having dinner together, networking with a drink in hand – a video call cannot replace that. But the community made it possible without any fuss, and I am grateful for that.
My talk: mage-remote-run in practice
I introduced mage-remote-run – my tool for managing Magento instances remotely without SSH access. Particularly in cloud-native environments such as Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service or secured Kubernetes clusters, you quickly run into limitations when trying to use familiar shell tools. That is why mage-remote-run consistently follows an API-first approach and communicates with the shop via HTTPS.
There is a video of the presentation at the meetup – I will link it here as soon as it is available.
One new feature was the plugin system in mage-remote-run, which I was able to present for the first time at the meetup.
MageForge: A build tool for frontend developers
Mathias Elle, a Magento and Hyvä frontend expert, has been working on MageForge together with Thomas Hauschild and presented what it is all about at the meetup. MageForge is a tool designed specifically for the needs of frontend developers in the Magento ecosystem – with a focus on build processes.
Anyone who has worked with Hyvä knows that its frontend stack is significantly more modern than classic Magento's. This is exactly where MageForge comes in: it aims to simplify and speed up build workflows without requiring you to dive deep into the configuration details. I am curious to see how the tool develops – this is exactly the kind of pragmatic tooling work that benefits the community.
The tool can also be useful in a CI/CD pipeline or when fixing broken frontend setups.
It is also impressive that it was tested at the highest PhpStan level.
Because it is so good, the next n98-magerun2 version will include a new mageforge:install command so you can quickly install it in your Magento system.
Claude AI benchmarks: How much of a difference do rules make?
Anton Gudkov, a Magento-certified developer, explored a topic that also occupies a lot of my attention: using Claude AI models in development. Kudos to him as well for giving his first talk at the meetup. His focus was on a specific and fascinating aspect – benchmarking different settings and rule sets.
The central question: how strongly do the configuration and defined rules influence the result a model such as Claude produces? This is something that is often underestimated in practice. You give the model a prompt, get an answer – and spend little time thinking about what happens when you systematically vary the surrounding conditions. Anton did exactly that and compared the results.
My conclusion (from afar): this is valuable work. Especially when integrating AI models into existing development processes, it is worth understanding these levers – rather than simply living with the default settings.
I hope to be there in person next time. Stuttgart would have been worth it. Thanks to Phoenix Media for the great organization, as always.