Think of the vault as the office building and each Piren installation as an office in the same building on the same network. The agent is an employee whose identity, memory, and tools live in the building, not in any single office.
So when an engineer has the laptop and skills they need, they can do their job from any office. Install Piren on a Raspberry Pi in the closet, a desktop, and a laptop, point all three at one synced vault, and heimdall is the same agent on every machine: same SOUL.md, same pending inbox, same skills, same cron jobs.
This is what makes Piren fault-tolerant out of the box. Tasks and cron jobs are claimed by atomic file operations with active-device priority. If one device goes dark, the next eligible device picks up the pending inbox and the due cron jobs automatically, because the work lives in the shared substrate, not in a process on the dead machine.
Which machines may host which agents is an installation policy (allowed_agents), kept outside the vault. The vault carries the team; the installation decides which office it runs in today.
