“Rerwriting Git from Scratch” is any interesting way to describe laboriously coaching ChatGPT into generating alternate names for common git commands.

This seems a bit to me like the ChatGPT version of “I’m a new designer, here is my redesign of Wikipedia”.

Perhaps this might have been a bit more interesting with a goal oriented prompt up front (i.e. "You are a developer that blah blah blah with the goal to help other developers maintain code by ...."

It isn't really from scratch, since it knows what git is.

A house isn’t really built from scratch, since the builder knows what a house is.

If you followed the language model in a forward pass, it is exactly the opposite. It begins at what git is in compressed weights and tears it down to what you wanted.

In the house analogy, they look at what you wanted and then the builder tears down the already built house to make it match what you wanted. There is no synthesis from 'scratch' in any form.

The only way it appears from sratch is through our perception, almost the same way individual frames in a movie clip make up a motion picture.