No it is not. From scratch has a meaning. To me it means: in a way that letxs you undrrstand the important details, e.g. using a programming language without major dependencies.
Calling that from scratch is like saying "Just go to the store and tell them what you want" in a series called: "How to make sausage from scratch".
When I want to know how to do X from scratch I am not interested in "how to get X the fastest way possible", to be frank I am not even interested in "How to get X in the way others typically get it", what I am interested in is learning how to do all the stuff that is normally hidden away in dependencies or frameworks myself — or, you know, from scratch. And considering the comments here I am not alone in that reading.
Your definition doesn’t match mine. My definition is fuzzier. It is “building something using no more than the common tools of the trade”. The term “common” is very era dependent.
For example, building a web server from scratch - I’d probably assume the presence of a sockets library or at the very least networking card driver support. For logging and configuration I’d assume standard I/o support.
It probably comes down to what you think makes LLMs interesting as programs.
It is okay to differ on this. Language is not an exact science. It is however always good to factor in expectations when you describe things.
E.g. when a title says it shows you how to do a thing in vanilla javascript from scratch bringing in jquery in the first step makes that tile a lie. If you bring in a hefty dependency on step 1 and run three imported function the vanilla javascript part might be fine, but the from scratch starts to do some heavy lifting.
Calling that from scratch is like saying "Just go to the store and tell them what you want" in a series called: "How to make sausage from scratch".
When I want to know how to do X from scratch I am not interested in "how to get X the fastest way possible", to be frank I am not even interested in "How to get X in the way others typically get it", what I am interested in is learning how to do all the stuff that is normally hidden away in dependencies or frameworks myself — or, you know, from scratch. And considering the comments here I am not alone in that reading.