The all/* harness selection cannot be combined with other…

Error message

The all/* harness selection cannot be combined with other selections

What it means

normalizeHarnessSelection treats 'all' and '*' as wildcards that select every guided harness, and rejects combining a wildcard with explicit harness tokens since that is ambiguous (explicit tokens would be redundant or contradictory). The error message states the constraint directly.

Solutions

Use just 'all' (or '*') when you want every guided harness.
List only the explicit harnesses you need, without the wildcard.
In scripts, choose one mode: either expand 'all' yourself or pass an explicit list, not both.
Sanitize combined inputs before calling the installer by de-duplicating: if 'all' is present, drop explicit tokens.

Example fix

// before
normalizeHarnessSelection('all,codex'); // throws

// after
const tokens = String(input).split(',').map(t => t.trim()).filter(Boolean);
const sel = tokens.includes('all') || tokens.includes('*') ? 'all' : tokens.join(',');
normalizeHarnessSelection(sel);

Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

const tokens = String(selection || '').split(',').map(t => t.trim()).filter(Boolean);
const hasAll = tokens.some(t => ['all', '*'].includes(t.toLowerCase()));
if (hasAll && tokens.length > 1) {
  throw new Error('Pass either "all" or an explicit harness list, not both');
}

Try / catch

try {
  const ids = normalizeHarnessSelection(selection);
} catch (e) {
  if (/all\/\* harness selection cannot be combined/.test(e.message)) {
    console.error('Use "all" alone, or list explicit harnesses without the wildcard.');
    process.exitCode = 2;
    return;
  }
  throw e;
}

Prevention

Normalize selections before invoking: if a wildcard is present, drop explicit tokens.
Avoid building harness lists by naive string concatenation in scripts/CI.
Document in the installer help that 'all'/'*' is exclusive of other values.

When it happens

Trigger: Calling the installer with a selection like 'all,claude-code', '*,cursor', or an array ['all', 'codex'] — any mix of wildcard and explicit tokens.

Common situations: Users trying to say 'all of these plus that one extra'; CI templates where a default 'all' is concatenated with a user-specified list; shell scripts appending flags and ending up with '--harnesses all,codex'.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of affaan-m/ECC@8321021c54 (2026-09-16). Data as JSON: /api/errors/1a42aecfad6d74fb. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at scripts/lib/harness-capabilities.js:337

}

function tokenizeSelection(selection) {
  const values = Array.isArray(selection) ? selection : [selection];
  return values.flatMap(value => (
    typeof value === 'string' ? value.split(',') : []
  )).map(value => value.trim()).filter(Boolean);
}

function normalizeHarnessSelection(selection) {
  const tokens = tokenizeSelection(selection);
  if (tokens.length === 0 || tokens.every(token => normalizeLookupToken(token) === 'none')) {
    throw new Error('At least one guided harness must be selected');
  }

  const allTokens = tokens.filter(token => ['all', '*'].includes(normalizeLookupToken(token)));
  const explicitTokens = tokens.filter(token => !['all', '*'].includes(normalizeLookupToken(token)));
  if (allTokens.length > 0 && explicitTokens.length > 0) {
    throw new Error('The all/* harness selection cannot be combined with other selections');
  }
  if (allTokens.length > 0) {
    return GUIDED_HARNESS_IDS.slice();
  }

  const selected = new Set();
  for (const token of tokens) {
    const normalizedToken = normalizeLookupToken(token);
    const menuIndex = /^\d+$/.test(normalizedToken) ? Number(normalizedToken) - 1 : -1;
    const harness = menuIndex >= 0
      ? listGuidedHarnesses()[menuIndex] || null
      : getHarnessCapability(token);

    if (!harness) {
      throw new Error(`Unknown guided harness selection: ${token}`);
    }
    if (!harness.guidedReady) {
      throw new Error(`${harness.label} is an advanced harness and is not guided-ready`);

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