The Last Year of the Steenbeck

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.