The driver passed -i <RUN_DIR>/ (a directory); ansible's directory-inventory
loader then parsed sibling files (notably 'current', which holds the real host
string 'askari') as INI inventory, creating phantom hosts incl. the real askari
with its full hostvars — violating the single-host safety invariant (and a hard
error in ansible 2.18 on the binary qcow2/seed files). Point -i at the single
hosts.yml file; ansible still loads the adjacent group_vars symlink. (review C1)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
