pql is now a bare word on PATH, which removed the long incantation that had been forcing --vault into every call by habit. Convenience lowered the cost of the wrong thing without lowering the cost of the right one: a three-word pql ticket new targets whichever vault the cwd happens to sit in, and there are nine of them with colliding id sequences. PQL_VAULT in each project settings file makes the vault a property of the session rather than of the working directory — the same lesson Rule 3 records for git -C, applied to pql. Verified the env var overrides cwd discovery, that an explicit --vault still beats the env var, and that the harness hot-reloads it without a restart. This does not make provenance visible: no output says which vault answered, so a forgotten --vault still returns a well-formed answer about the wrong dataset. That remains T-37. Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>