Free and Under-$12 Upgrades

Surfaced by a post claiming Anthropic had shared one of the best tricks for Claude Code, which for once was close to true. The Bash sandbox is a boundary the operating system enforces around shell commands Claude runs, covering Bash, PowerShell, and Monitor commands plus any process they start. Because the limits are applied by the OS while a command runs, Claude Code can run sandboxed commands without asking you to approve each one.

This speaks straight to how you work. This session runs in bypass permissions mode, which removes the prompts by removing the boundary. The sandbox removes the prompts and keeps a boundary, which is the better trade on a machine holding a 17 GB site estate and a never-delete policy.

Supported on macOS, Linux, and WSL2. Built into Claude Code, so there is nothing to buy. Open /sandbox to see the panel, or set it for a single session without touching a settings file:

claude --settings '{"sandbox": {"enabled": true, "allowUnsandboxedCommands": false}}'

Two details worth knowing before you turn it on. Sandboxed commands write to the working directory, the per-user temp directory, and anything added with --add-dir, so paths such as /Volumes/T7 Shield/ need an explicit sandbox.filesystem.allowWrite entry. File tools, MCP servers, and hooks run outside the sandbox entirely, so your hook chain is unaffected.

Surfaced by a post framing it as a trading edge. It is an official Anthropic repository, Apache 2.0, with roughly 40.7k stars, holding ten named agents and a set of vertical skill bundles for investment banking and equity research.

You do no finance work, so the agents are irrelevant. The reason it is on this page is the core financial-analysis plugin, which carries xlsx-author, audit-xls, pptx-author, and deck-refresh. Your standing rule is that tabular data ships as .xlsx with a named Table and never as bare CSV, and these are purpose-built authors and auditors for exactly that, written by Anthropic rather than hand-rolled.

claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/financial-services
claude plugin install financial-analysis@claude-for-financial-services

Install the core plugin only. The MCP data connectors it also ships, for FactSet, S&P Global, and PitchBook, each need a paid subscription, so leave those alone and the whole thing stays free.

Two posts pushed this hard, one of them as a hundred skills on one screen with the star count as the headline. The repository is real, public, from Anthropic, at roughly 183.2k stars, and installs as a plugin marketplace.

The score is low because you are already running it. Your available-skills list shows the document skills, docx, pdf, pptx, and xlsx, along with skill-creator, dataviz, and the artifact skills. The useful outcome here is a check rather than an install, since this is the upstream source for the ones you hold.

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
/plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

One licence detail to carry: most skills are Apache 2.0, and the four document skills in skills/docx, skills/pdf, skills/pptx, and skills/xlsx are source-available rather than open source. That matters if you ever vendor their code into your own tooling.

This one appeared twice, once on For You and once on Following, which is what drew a closer look. It is a Claude Code template carrying 49 agents in a three-tier hierarchy, 74 slash-command skills, 15 hooks, 14 path-scoped rules, and 62 document templates.

You build no games, so the score is deliberately low. The transferable parts are structural: a /gate-check command, 15 hooks firing on commit, push, asset change, and session events, and a modes.rigor setting in project.yaml offering minimal, standard, and full. A dial for how much process a task has to clear is the piece your honesty gate lacks, since yours fires at full strength on every turn regardless of whether the turn is a one-line edit or a shipped chapter.

Worth reading the hook definitions. Not worth installing.

The biggest item on the page, and it was sitting in plain sight. /Applications/Obsidian.app reports 1.12.7. Current public stable is 1.14.5, released 22 October 2026. You are two minor versions back, and four of the features added in between land on friction you already work around.

• Edit Markdown files from outside the vault (1.14.2). Your finished output goes to ~/Projects/_outputs/, which is not inside Brandon-Vault, so every one of those files currently needs a copy or a different editor.
• macOS Quick Look for Markdown (1.14.3), previewing a .md file with Obsidian closed. This is the clean answer to the standing rule against opening Markdown in Preview.
• Kanban layout and a Group menu in Bases (1.14.0 and 1.14.4). Bases is core, so this costs nothing and gives the Workflow Command Center a board view with no community plugin.
• Colour highlight syntax (1.14.0), written as ==🔵blue==.
• Electron 43.7.5 to 43.8.3 (1.14.5), described in the release note as several important security fixes. On its own this justifies moving.

The upgrade is a download and reinstall from obsidian.md. Your thirteen enabled community plugins carry over, since plugin state lives in the vault and not in the app bundle.

A research preview of Claude running as a proactive agent. It raises what needs your attention, works while you are away, and checks before acting on your behalf. Built on Opus 5.5, carrying over the memory, skills, and connected apps already on your account, so setup is close to nothing.

Access is by waitlist, open to US users on Pro and Max. There is no separate fee. The caveat that matters: its background checks draw on the same usage limits as everything else, and on an allowance that runs out weekly, that is worth watching rather than assuming it is free in practice.

Runs as a standalone iOS and Android app, and on claude.ai. Several For You posts offered to sell you a guide to building your own version of it. Join the waitlist instead.

Dashboards connects a data platform and builds a live dashboard from a plain-language question, writing the query itself and showing that query on every chart. Motion turns an idea into an animated explainer.

Both land on work you already do by hand. The estate is roughly a thousand HTML routes, many of them dashboards assembled one at a time, and a dashboard that shows its own query satisfies the provenance rule with no extra effort. Motion is the obvious fit for the book-to-video stage.

Announced 22 October: sessions on Claude web, desktop, and mobile begin running in auto mode by default on Pro, Max, and Team. An automated check blocks risky actions in place of asking you to approve each step, and manual mode stays available.

Pairs with the Bash sandbox above, which is the same idea applied to shell commands on this machine. Worth knowing before it arrives rather than after.

Claude sits in a Workspace sidebar, reads the open file, and edits in place with per-edit approval. In the other direction, a pasted Google file link opens beside the chat. Access follows your existing Google sharing permissions.

This session already carries a Google Drive connector, so the gain is editing in place rather than reading and rewriting. It also matters for the Etsy delivery work, where a Drive link is the only accepted proof of delivery.

You have the prerequisite installed and enabled already. obsidian-local-rest-api is in your community plugin list, and nothing is configured against it. The bridge is half built.

MarkusPfundstein/mcp-obsidian exposes list_files_in_vault, list_files_in_dir, get_file_contents, search, patch_content, append_content, and delete_file. The two that matter are patch_content and append_content, because your existing retrieval path reads the vault and cannot write to it. That is the gap this closes: session notes, artifact rows, and decision logs written straight into Brandon-Vault.

Prerequisites are Python 3.11 or later and the mcp SDK pinned below 2.0, since 2.0 removes the API the server uses. Default host and port are 127.0.0.1:27124.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "obsidian": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["mcp-obsidian"],
      "env": {
        "OBSIDIAN_API_KEY": "<key from the Local REST API plugin>",
        "OBSIDIAN_HOST": "127.0.0.1",
        "OBSIDIAN_PORT": "27124"
      }
    }
  }
}

One caution before you wire it: delete_file exists, and your standing policy forbids deletion. Set that tool to require approval, or leave it unpermitted.

Written by Obsidian's own kepano and released separately from the app. It renders Mermaid syntax to themeable SVG, claims up to 500 times faster than the current renderer, and takes colours and fonts from the surrounding stylesheet.

Two uses. It ships inside Obsidian 1.15.0, which is early access. It is also an npm package you can drop into any page in the estate, where SVG inheriting the page palette solves the usual problem of a diagram arriving in its own unrelated colours.

npm install pele

import { render } from 'pele';
const { svg } = render(`flowchart LR
  A[Mermaid text] --> B[SVG]`);
document.querySelector('#diagram').innerHTML = svg;

The project page documents npm only, with no CDN listed, so a page needing it without a build step would have to vendor the bundle.

$4 per month billed annually, $5 billed monthly. One synced vault, 1 GB of storage, one month of version history.

This speaks to a problem you have already fought. Syncthing is banned for destroying files, the git sync script is banned, and the only sanctioned cross-Mac channel is a manual iCloud copy. Obsidian Sync covers one vault end to end with version history, written by the vendor rather than a third-party watcher.

The honest limits: 1 GB covers Brandon-Vault's notes and little else, so it replaces the vault leg of the handoff and leaves ~/.claude, ~/Projects, and the Desktop folders exactly as they are. Treat it as narrowing the manual channel rather than closing it.

$8 per site per month annually, $10 monthly. Listed because it clears the budget line, and recommended against.

You already publish to GitHub Pages at no cost, and that host doubles as the cross-Mac transfer channel, since a pushed route is both live and available by git pull on the second Mac. Publish would add a monthly fee for less than you have.

A single $25 payment, not a subscription, giving early access to beta builds plus community badges and channels. It is what gates 1.15.0, which carries the Pele renderer, reorderable Bases filters, and URI and CLI commands that append or prepend under a named heading.

It fails the brief on price, and it is also unnecessary. Every 1.15.0 feature reaches public stable eventually, and Pele is separately available as an npm package today. Going from 1.12.7 to 1.14.5 is free and delivers more than Catalyst would.