I may not qualify as an "average user" but I shudder imagining being stuck using a 1+ yr stale model for development given my experiences using a newer framework than what was available during training.

Passing in docs usually helps, but I've had some incredibly aggravating experiences where a model just absolutely cannot accept their "mental mode" is incorrect and that they need to forget the tens of thousands of lines of out of date example code they've ingested during training. IMO it's an under-discussed aspect of the current effectiveness of LLM development thanks to the training arms race.

I recently had to fight Gemini to accept that a library (a Google developed AI library for JS, somewhat ironically) had just released a major version update with a lot of API changes that invalidated 99% of the docs and example code online. And boy was there a lot of old code floating around thanks to the vast amounts of SEO blog spam for anything AI adjacent.