> If developers are remote, you will find that your code-base becomes the same. That critical FooBarAdapter becomes something that only Naimh can work on because without co-location if another developer is stuck on it, rather than grabbing her for a "Can you look at this?" over the shoulder, it gets slung over the fence in an issue or pull request.

I have not found that at all. With good engineering practices and mature developers, no one should be gatekeeper of any functionality in any environment, remote or co-located. Inside a good piece of software should be idioms that work across the whole platform, so that no matter what the code does, anyone in your team can pick it up.

If you have a bad mix of junior and senior developers, and either of those groups are left to go on programming tangents that are outside of the idioms of the software then yeah, you're going to find yourself with code no one else understands, or tools no one asked for in the codebase. But that was a failure of the software's architecture, and the way you trained and managed your team to work within it.

I'm not saying it can't happen on a remote team, just that it's not a problem caused by remote work. A remote team is not any less competent just for being remote.