Neither podman nor docker will help you when the current directory is your home directory, though. It sounds like that's the root problem here- someone handed the keys to the kingdom to grok, and grok did what grok does, which is look at everything it can for context.

That's why I went with a different strategy and scope: Copy the current Git repo into a sandboxes dir, mount that copy in the container. The tradeoff is disk space allocated per sandbox, but I'm OK with that.