Using LLMs To Expand Your Working Vocabulary

Fundamental skills that will carry you through the most difficult parts of your career. It'll carry you through the transitions in your career. It'll carry you through disruptions like what we're experiencing right now with AI. It'll carry your carry you through uh from title changes, from hopping tracks, let's say you're an engineer and you want to become a manager. The fundamental mindset that I want to reinforce to remind you of today is the mindset of building your vocabulary.

Building your vocabulary. And to be clear, uh I partially mean building your literal vocabulary. But it goes beyond that. And it's part of the uh fundamental mission of this show, of this podcast. To help developers, to help engineers, software engineers, data analytics engineers, product engineers, front end developers. Uh people who are building things, whoever you are, you probably count in this, okay? To help you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in your career.

and finding clarity Finding perspective and even finding purpose. Those efforts rely on the the mental tooling that we talk about so much on this show. How do you find clarity? How do you find perspective? How do you find your purpose? And the first building blocks are your vocabulary. So when we talk about mental models on this show, that is a form of vocabulary. The mental model concepts that you build, that lattice work.

That is part of your vocabulary because it will help you in attaining, for example, clarity. A mental model can help you in attaining perspective. A model can even help you in understanding purpose. Building your vocabulary is also about understanding your own self, the granularity of your own self. You know, we've heard stories about

how there are different words in different languages. You can Google this. I don't have a sp a good specific example for this, but uh I'll I'll make something up here. For example, there may be so many words for the underlying concept of love. And a given language may have a really specific articulation of a feeling, an idea. uh that another language doesn't have. So this nuanced explanation. the nuanced vocabulary, uh, the ability to combine these ideas together.

This uh is a good analogy for understanding the variety of, for example, personal values you hold. Understanding the way that you respond under stress. the kinds of things that you care about over time, how do you operate in a high intensity environment? These are all pieces of your personal kind of intellectual, emotional, spiritual, uh, whatever, uh, you know, A L word you want to use here, uh, these are all types of vocabularies that you can develop for yourself.

Another another more concrete example of this that I've experienced in my personal life is understanding different forms Uh in in my personal life, I I mean in my personal career life, understanding different forms of diagrams is very simple uh, you know, vocabulary that I've been working on recently. Understanding, for example, what is a causal loop diagram? Now what's really interesting is that

We can build our vocabulary and then we can take advantage of this vocabulary in new and unique ways. Another good example of this, there are paradigms in programming. Paradigms and and uh design patterns, those kinds of uh kind of models, ways of thinking about things. So if you have never experienced, for example, the asynchronous paradigm or the event driven architectural paradigm,

uh then those pieces of vocabulary, which may be useful, again, these are kind of like mental models, right? They may be useful in multiple contexts, uh, but y you won't have access to those until you learn that vocabulary. Right, so uh this is something that even Paul Graham talked about. He talked about the idea that uh, you know, understanding something like small talk provided a unique advantage.

That was a kind of a leap ahead of other programming languages because it has a fundamentally different paradigm. Uh there are there are parts and pieces of how you would use small talk that uh that that don't have a good analogue with other languages. Vocabulary. has been useful uh to Paul Graham and many, many other engineers who have found tools that express what they are thinking in more uh nuanced or more powerful, higher leverage ways.

If you are able to develop this vocabulary, and I would say you have an opportunity to uh continue refining this vocabulary by learning about it and exploring the nuances of it with. uh with an LLM, for example, you are going to be able to wield a more uh complete Kind of picture. um uh in whatever endeavor you're you're moving into. So for example, if I wanted to explore a subject that I've never uh that I've never thought about before. Now I have some some tools at my disposal.

Uh I will, you know, search for various systems and try to develop an understanding of the causal loops in the system that's at play. This helps me get a picture for what kinds of things are happening. Where are the leverage points? What might I do to change things, to balance something out?

You know, what does the system look like? And I can do a lot of this work now uh just by having the vocabulary. I don't necessarily have to have you know, uh, every piece of skill underlying skill or or perfection of that vocabulary. But having that top level uh and understanding those concepts so I can piece them together, this is probably the most valuable skill. that I've learned that I've picked up in my career, the ability to add to your repertoire, um, to add to your overall vocabulary.

Some of these ways of thinking. Um I I won't limit it to mental models because I do think it goes beyond that, that the concept of a mental model captures some parts of this, but it's not entirely complete. Um, you know, for example, understanding what a what a C four diagram This is a piece of vocabulary. It might be, you know, uh you you could kind of squint and call that a mental model, but really it's just

some vocabulary and uh and here I I you know I want to be careful that you understand what I mean when I say vocabulary. I really mean conceptual vocabulary. I I don't mean just one word, but also what the connotation of that word, where does it come from? When is it useful? How does it piece together with other things that are adjacent? You know, when when would you care about seeing a C four diagram versus say a a pipeline, uh, you know, that kind of uh uh you know, charting.

There are plenty of opportunities to develop your vocabulary as you learn uh about these various things. Well, you know, one one way that I would suggest that you pick up um as soon as possible. is to start with the fundamental kind of primitives, the principled pieces. of your system. Think about the inputs, the outputs, the flows.

Is this a static system? Is it a dynamically changing system? You know, the thinking in these systematic terms can help you understand what are the primitive uh you know interacting pieces. And then you can think about, okay, you know, what what am I trying to get out of this? And am I trying to understand, you know, how these things work over time? Maybe there is some kind of time series graph that would be a piece of vocabulary.

Uh so you know one one uh incredibly useful tool in this regard, and I won't recommend using LLMs for everything in your life, but this is a place where an LLM does a fairly good job. And the reason for that is because you can describe these primitives and you can ask uh you know, essentially ask questions and because of the way LLMs are trained and because of how uh the the kind of lookup will work, you're going to find something that many people uh have likely used for that type of primitive.

So if you had XY data, you're likely to find a scatterplot graph as a tool that you might use to visualize that XY data. Um this is a remarkably good tool for expanding your vocabulary for that reason.

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer T. I hope you will make it a point. uh you know in your learning journey in particular, make it a point to always be expanding your vocabulary. This means that you're looking for the leverage points at the categorical level. You're not just looking to you know, add a little skill here and there. You're not just looking to learn how to use a thing.

Right. Um that is a lower leverage um change to your skill level. Right. The much higher leverage is to know why you're using that thing in that context. Why would you use that thing instead of another thing? When would you use something different? Uh, you know, how can you piece together your various pieces of vocabulary to get the things that you care about, to get the insights that you care about, et cetera. Thanks so much for listening.

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