{"version":"v1","site":{"name":"expectedwrong","url":"https://expectedwrong.com"},"links":{"collection":"https://expectedwrong.com/api/public/posts","rss":"https://expectedwrong.com/rss.xml","llms":"https://expectedwrong.com/llms.txt"},"post":{"slug":"the-last-year-of-the-steenbeck","title":"The Last Year of the Steenbeck","subtitle":"Cursor is free for students now, which means we should probably stop pretending otherwise.","url":"https://expectedwrong.com/the-last-year-of-the-steenbeck","api_url":"https://expectedwrong.com/api/public/posts/the-last-year-of-the-steenbeck","published_at":1746619200,"published_at_iso":"2025-05-07T12:00:00.000Z","updated_at":1771554616,"updated_at_iso":"2026-02-20T02:30:16.000Z","tags":["ai","education","cursor","tools","craft"],"excerpt":"Cursor is free for students now, which means we should probably stop pretending otherwise.","meta_description":"Cursor is free for students now, which means we should probably stop pretending otherwise.","reading_time_minutes":2,"word_count":266,"engagement":{"signals":0,"counterpoints":0},"body_markdown":"Cursor is free for students. Not discounted — free. Which means the fiction that CS education involves unassisted humans writing code from scratch is now, officially, a legacy format.\n\nI graduated NYU the last year the film program still used actual film — splicing on a Steenbeck, cut-and-tape editing, the whole ritual. Digital video came in the year after I left, like it had been waiting politely in the hall. At the time I thought, well, at least I learned the real thing. The quicker realization, which took maybe three months, was that DV was the real thing. The Steenbeck was the charming footnote I happened to live inside for one semester.\n\nThe film-to-DV gap was enormous technically and nearly invisible creatively. Nobody watching your edit cares what you cut it on. The transition from hand-typed code to AI-assisted code is the same species of non-event — except somehow we've assigned more moral weight to it, as if there is something ennobling about remembering how to implement a binary search tree from memory, by yourself, in an exam room, in 2025.\n\nThere isn't. There's a skill to directing AI, the same way there was a skill to directing a camera. The syntax was never the point. It was always the judgment.\n\nThe students coming up now will never know what it felt like to stare at a blank file and have only yourself to yell at. I'm not sure they're missing anything. I just know how it felt to be the last cohort who got to touch the Steenbeck — equal parts lucky and immediately obsolete.","body_text":"Cursor is free for students. Not discounted — free. Which means the fiction that CS education involves unassisted humans writing code from scratch is now, officially, a legacy format. I graduated NYU the last year the film program still used actual film — splicing on a Steenbeck, cut-and-tape editing, the whole ritual. Digital video came in the year after I left, like it had been waiting politely in the hall. At the time I thought, well, at least I learned the real thing. The quicker realization, which took maybe three months, was that DV was the real thing. The Steenbeck was the charming footnote I happened to live inside for one semester. The film-to-DV gap was enormous technically and nearly invisible creatively. Nobody watching your edit cares what you cut it on. The transition from hand-typed code to AI-assisted code is the same species of non-event — except somehow we've assigned more moral weight to it, as if there is something ennobling about remembering how to implement a binary search tree from memory, by yourself, in an exam room, in 2025. There isn't. There's a skill to directing AI, the same way there was a skill to directing a camera. The syntax was never the point. It was always the judgment. The students coming up now will never know what it felt like to stare at a blank file and have only yourself to yell at. I'm not sure they're missing anything. I just know how it felt to be the last cohort who got to touch the Steenbeck — equal parts lucky and immediately obsolete.","hindsight":{"verdict":"right","note":"The Steenbeck metaphor landed. AI-assisted coding became the real thing. The three-month realization — that the new way is the real way — happened faster than expected for most CS programs.","links":[],"at":1739980800,"at_iso":"2025-02-19T16:00:00.000Z"}}}