unrust
An 11-minute, unassisted diagnostic

AI is quietly making you a worse engineer

You still ship. But how much of the craft is still yours? Every suggestion you accept is a rep you skip. Unrust is a short, unassisted diagnostic — no editor tooling, no autocomplete, no assistant — that measures how sharp six core skills remain, and how much has quietly begun to oxidize underneath.

6 skills · 11 minutes · no AI assistance

Skill oxidation profile

Six skills, scored without AI

BandRusty
Recall80%Debugging65%Find the flaw40%Tracing55%Idiom70%AI-slop35%

Skill integrity 58%

Pre-AI baseline
Oxidation
scale
You
PolishedTarnishedOxidizedRusty
What it measures

Six skills AI lets you offload

Each is graded from short, knowledge-neutral drills — no trivia, no frameworks-of-the-month. Just the fundamentals that erode when a model does them for you.

RECALL01

Recall

Produce the syntax and API from memory — no autocomplete quietly finishing the line for you.

DEBUG02

Debugging

Given failing code, find the fault. The skill AI takes over the fastest, and you notice the least.

FLAW03

Find the Flaw

Read logic against intent and catch the check that's subtly, confidently wrong.

TRACING04

Tracing

Run the machine in your head — predict what the code actually does, step by step.

IDIOM05

Idiom / Quality

Tell idiomatic from clumsy. The taste that separates a senior from a generator.

AI-SLOP06

AI-slop Detection

Catch clean-looking code that's backwards. The new core skill of the AI era.

The thesis

You can’t feel the decay. That’s the whole problem.

When a model writes the code, you review it instead of producing it. Reviewing feels like competence — and the skill of producing quietly fades. The gap only shows up when the assistant is gone: an interview, an outage, a codebase the model gets wrong.

The only way to see it is to remove the assistant and measure. Unrust times you unassisted, grades each skill against an expert-anchored rubric, and shows you a banded profile — Sharp, Holding, Rusty, Offloaded. Retake it over time and a real trend separates a bad day from actual decay.

Provisional v0.1: a 6-item read is a rough estimate, not a verdict. Single spokes carry wide error bars; the trend is what matters.

How it works

From one read to a habit

01

Take the test

11 minutes, unassisted — no AI, no autocomplete, one sitting. Python or JavaScript.

02

Get a per-skill profile

Six dimensions, each banded Sharp → Offloaded. Free, no account needed for your first read.

03

Save it and build a trend

Retake in a few weeks. A skill's score falls when you stop exercising it — so the line, not one reading, is the signal.

04

Practice the soft spots

A short daily loop of unassisted drills that adapts to your profile, so the skills you offloaded come back.

Pricing

Free to measure. Subscribe to rebuild.

Your diagnostic score is always free. A subscription unlocks the daily practice loop, the full drill library, per-skill mastery, and your saved trend over time.

Monthly
$14.99/ mo
$14.99 / month

Full access, month to month. Cancel anytime.

  • Daily adaptive practice loop
  • Full unassisted drill library
  • Per-skill mastery tracking
  • Saved trend history over time
Save 40%
Annual
$9/ mo
$108 / year · billed yearly

Save ~40% vs. paying monthly. Billed once a year.

  • Daily adaptive practice loop
  • Full unassisted drill library
  • Per-skill mastery tracking
  • Saved trend history over time

Prices in USD. Eurozone customers are billed in EUR, everyone else in USD — set automatically at checkout. Cancel anytime.

See where you actually stand.

Eleven unassisted minutes. A per-skill profile at the end, free. Then watch it — or work it back up.