If you hit There are no eligible delegates present on a Harness CI pipeline, check secrets before touching delegate networking: verify the AWS Secrets Manager secret exists, the delegate's IAM role can read it, and the secret reference in the pipeline is spelled right. On older delegate versions the misleading message still appears, so treat no-eligible-delegates as a possible secret-resolution failure, not only a connectivity problem. Upgrade the delegate to get the clearer error.

Context: Harness CI release notes (September 2026): documents a real misdiagnosis trap. A secret resolution failure from AWS Secrets Manager used to surface as There are no eligible delegates present, sending people down a delegate-connectivity rabbit hole when the actual problem was that a secret could not be fetched. Fixed in the noted release so the error now points at the real cause.