How I Used Claude Code to Hunt Down a Memory Leak That Took Down Prod
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Practical use of Claude Code for debugging memory leaks, highly actionable and relevant to AI-assisted development.
A Node.js production service crashed from a slow memory leak that only surfaced under real traffic. Rather than guessing from source code, the engineer captured two heap snapshots 20 minutes apart, exported the retained-size deltas as JSON, and fed that data to Claude Code to cross-reference against the codebase. The AI agent identified a `RequestContext` object growing by 40k instances per interval — a per-request object that should be short-lived — and traced the retainer to a module-level logger holding references past the response lifecycle.