Flaming Ape LLC

Veteran-owned Texas software company. Makers of Gorilla Warden, a free, open-source control layer for AI agent fleets. Public beta November 2026.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Meet Flaming Ape 🦍

I'm Ken, a retired Navy Chief and founder of Flaming Ape LLC, a veteran-owned Texas software company.

We're building Gorilla Warden: a free, open-source gatekeeper that keeps AI agents on budget, stops runaway loops, and queues at rate limits instead of failing.

Free public beta on GitHub in November 2026.

https://t.co/xpczIVVhlB

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

New video: how I actually started with AI, after I stopped watching demos.

Watching another AI demo feels like progress. It isn't.

What worked for me: one boring task, one AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT, whatever you've got) for a week, read every line it gives you, and a two-minute debrief after every session. No ten-tool setup.

There's a five-day challenge at the end. 🦍

https://t.co/ww7OU7VoDc

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

@pcshipp Usually it's not one big prompt. Long sessions drag the whole context into every turn, an agent gets stuck retrying the same failing step, and Opus ends up doing chores a smaller model could handle. Clearing between tasks and watching for loops does more than any prompt trick.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Just wrapped our biggest real-money test of Gorilla Warden yet.

33 hours. 57 test runs. Real AI agents, real money, every run done twice: once without Warden, once with it.

In our tests, every runaway agent got stopped and normal work ran untouched.

Full results and the raw data go public with the beta in November. Don't trust us, trust the method. 🦍

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

@heynavtoor Wrong with confidence is the hard case, because nothing feels off. That's why I'd rather trust a receipt than a vibe: what the agent ran, what it changed, what it cost. If you can't read the trail afterward, you won't catch the miss.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Gorilla Warden is now being tested against real AI spending.

This week's dev update:

• Side-by-side proof runs started: same tasks, with and without Warden, real money on the line. About two days of runs. Results when they're in.
• The Windows installer is now code-signed by Flaming Ape LLC. No more "Unknown Publisher" scare screen.
• Load testing with 1,000 agents passed almost everything. It turned up a small slowdown that builds over long runs. We're fixing it before release, not shipping around it.
• Works today with Claude Code and Codex. Grok CLI, Gemini CLI, Aider, Cline and Continue are planned before beta.

Free beta on GitHub: still on track for November.

#buildinpublic

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

My AI agents burned $40 while I wasn't looking.

No alarm. No warning. Just a balance sitting at $0.00.

New video on what happened, what I learned, and how I'm solving it:
https://t.co/HC16ZukzfV

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Gorilla Warden update 🦍

Code signing is live. The Windows installer is signed by Flaming Ape LLC, so Windows shows a verified publisher instead of "unknown."

First test on a fresh Windows install: from installer to tracking a live AI agent in under 2 minutes.

Then we watched it work. An agent went over its limit, Warden warned, then blocked the next request before it reached the AI provider. Cost of that request: $0. A runaway test script got stopped on its 10th request.

Privacy check passed. Warden stores none of what agents say, and it adds about 1 millisecond per request. Testing caught three bugs before any user did.

Next up: head-to-head runs this week, Warden off vs. on, with the results published. Plus a caution light in the system tray: green, yellow, red.

Free beta in November. #buildinpublic

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

@RoundtableSpace The approval layers and stop conditions bit is the one I'd open first. Easy to get excited about the agent loop and forget the hard stop has to live outside the model. Something you can hit when you're not staring at the terminal.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

@corhoonx Exactly. If the meter resets every time something crashes, you can't trust any number it shows you. The record has to survive the crash.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Gorilla Warden update 🦍

Rough Tuesday. Tests were failing on Windows and Mac, so we fixed them one at a time, including making sure no usage record gets lost on shutdown.

By Thursday, Warden was running our own daily work, with zero failures caused by Warden. Agents that hit a limit now get a clear "stop, don't retry" message.

1,382 tests passing on Windows, Mac and Linux. Microsoft verified our identity for code signing, so the Windows installer will come signed.

Next up: the Windows installer and the free beta in November. #buildinpublic

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

@neil_xbt Favorite part is the pause going straight through with no token. The cap sits in a file the agent can't touch, it can't approve its own change, and the brake never asks permission. Working on that for agent spend at https://t.co/7UrAHFIPR4

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Makes sense. A lot of what I pay for on agent runs is the agent rediscovering the codebase every session: grepping, opening files, rereading what it read yesterday. The IDE already did that work. Interesting that the strongest models gained the most. Good pilots get more out of good instruments, not less.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

First product's up, and it isn't software.

I learned AI from scratch after 24 years in the Navy. So I wrote the guide I wish I'd had: picking and testing a business idea, 34 copy-and-paste AI prompts, a 30-day launch plan, and LLC basics, including veteran fee waivers.

Plain English. Built for veterans and anyone new to AI. Launch sale: 30% off, $18.90.

https://t.co/DGwUfgugB9

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

The part that gets me is the productivity was real and the bill still got away from them. That's rarely one big mistake. It's thousands of small runs nobody priced: retries, long sessions, agents rereading context they already had. An annual budget only tells you once it's gone. Cost per run, checked weekly, catches the drift while it's cheap to fix.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

The admin is where I've seen bills get weird too. An agent retrying a test that was never going to pass will keep paying no matter what model it's on. Before I moved work around, I'd want cost per run where I can see it and a hard stop when one starts circling. Still testing our take on that at https://t.co/bEopBB9r6k

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Appreciate that you included the part where it can raise your bill. Most token tips skip that. Same lesson I keep relearning: what an agent does between calls costs more than the calls themselves. Idle gaps, retries, rereading context it already had. None of that shows on the invoice. You only see it per run.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Gorilla Warden™ is officially filed with the USPTO 🦍

Same week, its first test against a real AI API: every task passed, the cost count matched Claude Code's to the cent, and the same tasks ran about 30% cheaper through Warden.

Tiny test, so grain of salt. Bigger tests start next week.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Spent 24 years in Naval aviation. We never trusted a jet because it flew fine yesterday. We trusted the checklist, the limits, and the guy whose hand was on the cutoff. Agents should get the same deal. Narrow permissions up front, logs you can actually read after something goes sideways, and a stop that really stops everything it kicked off, not just the parent process. Trust but always verify.

[Flaming Ape LLC @FlamingApeLLC]

Gorilla Warden update 🦍

Connecting your AI coding agents and your own Python agents now takes a click. The dashboard shows what your AI is using and where the spend is going.

First full Windows test run is coming up. Getting close. #buildinpublic