A professional editor who stops drafting entirely will eventually become a worse editor—not immediately, but over time. According to neuroscientific research, the skill of evaluation is downstream of the skill of production. While they may appear separable in any given task, the editing brain only functions optimally when it has recent experience as a drafting brain. The judgment applied after the fact depends on the capacity built during the process.
Researchers Risco and Gilbert have framed this phenomenon, emphasizing that even for judgment-only tasks, one must ask: does this judgment still hold if I stop producing the input myself? This question becomes urgent in the age of AI. It's easy to feel sharp as an evaluator, but harder to notice that evaluations are getting shallower because you haven't been in the production seat. The capacities are linked. Outsource the drafting long enough, and you might not notice your editing getting worse—until you do.