Some of them evolved into the plumbing commands that still exist to this day, like git cat-file and git write-tree , others were fundamentally different (for example, git read-tree is a current Git plumbing command but the original read-tree was more like the current git ls-files ), however, at a low level the concepts all exist still. This pushed me to compile the Git Community Book, the Git Internals Peepcode PDF, build the git-scm.com website and write the Pro Git book - all of which eventually led me to GitHub. So if Linus and the early Git team didn’t initially imagine Git being an actual version control tool and just wanted to build the plumbing, where did the “porcelain“ commands that we know today actually come from?