E1705. Approvals: no separate approver available

Severity: ERROR. Class: HITLNoApproverAvailable (subclass of PolicyDeniedError).

What happened

Org has only one user (Free or Solo tier, or a one-seat Teams org). The approval workflow refuses to enable because there's no separate human to approve.

Why it matters

Self-approval is governance theater. If the requestor and the only approver are the same person, the workflow adds friction without governance.

How to fix

Invite a teammate, OR upgrade to Teams ($199/mo + $29/seat), OR stop calling request_approval() on a solo org. Free + Solo tier users see the toggle disabled in /settings/hitl.

Removing escalate_on_deny: true will NOT change this error. That tag is currently inert (#2391) and never raises a request, so it cannot be what reached the approver check -- an explicit request_approval() call is.

Catching this error

except PolicyDeniedError catches this. Approval refusal becomes a hard deny.

See also

• Approval Workflow. The parent concept
• SDK: Approval callback. The request_approval + wait API
• Errors index