Mollick's rule reads like reassurance. It is a job description.

In the loop is not a place you occupy by standing near it. It is the seat where the output stops and someone reads it, and that someone answers for every line that goes out under their name.

Most people are in the loop the way a passenger is in the cockpit.

The tell is small and daily.

The summary forwarded without opening the source. The number pasted into the deck because the model produced it in a confident font. The client email approved in four seconds, which is the time it takes to feel busy and not the time it takes to read.

You cannot check work you could not have done. That is what the rule demands, under the friendly wording.

To sit in the loop on a contract, you have to know what a bad clause looks like. On a forecast, what an impossible growth rate looks like.

Judgment is not a posture. It is stored work.

So the loop costs something. It costs back the hour the tool saved you, spent on the one paragraph in five that would embarrass you in front of a client.

Take the one AI output leaving your desk today with your name on it. Read it line by line and mark the single claim you would have to defend in a room. If you cannot defend it, you were never in the loop — you were the last person to press send.