Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Don't get stuck using old models

23 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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An engineer's traditional debugging method got outpaced when a teammate used Claude to spot a memory leak and generate a fix faster. The speaker warns that AI models evolve quickly, and experienced users need to actively update how they work instead of relying on outdated approaches.

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Model changes so often that I sometimes get stuck in this old way of thinking about it. I even find that new people on the team do stuff in a more AGI forward way than I do. I had this case where there was a memory leak. This was a very common kind of engineering problem that every engineer has debugged a thousand times. And traditionally, the way that you do it is you take a heap snapshot, you put it into a special debugger. I was doing this, looking through these traces and trying to figure out what was going on. And the engineer that was newer on the team just had Quadco do it and was like, hey, Claude, it seems like there's a leak. Can you figure it out? Claud Code did exactly the same thing that I was doing. It found the issue and put up a pull request faster than I could. For those of us that have been using the model for a long time, you still have to transport yourself to the current moment and not get stuck back in an old model, because it's not Sonnet 3.5 anymore. The new models are just completely, completely different.