Totally confused by the plugin's context engineering

[DavidFarago]

My Obsidian Copilot is behaving totally erroneously, either not including any contents, a single file I neither addressed nor have open, or a huge number of tokens that the LLM cannot handle.

I have a lot of experience with coding tools, constructing own agents and context engineering, but I just don't get this plugin to behave sensible. What am I doing wrong?

Details

I have a vault that contains several folders with contents coming in from the outside (e.g. voicenotes). I have a folder myobsidianvault within the vault where all my personal notes live (nothing from the outside unless I let it in). Maybe this setup is confusing Obsidian Copilot?

Before i had created an index through the QA configuration menu, I tried:

"Index myobsidianvault" (I don't give it any context)

Um deinen Obsidian-Vault myobsidianvault zu indexieren, benötige ich Zugriff auf die darin enthaltenen Notizen bzw. ihren Inhalt. Aktuell liegt mir nur die tägliche Notiz vom 2025-11-10 vor.
Translates to: To index myobsidianvault, I need access to the notes therein resp. its contents. Currently, I only have your daily note from 2025-11-10.

"give me a recap of my last week {myobsidianvault}" leads to:

400 This endpoint's maximum context length is 1000000 tokens. However, you requested about 2586097 tokens (2580097 of text input, 6000 in the output). Please reduce the length of either one, or use the "middle-out" transform to compress your prompt automatically.

"give me a recap of my last week {myobsidianvault/daily}"

400 This endpoint's maximum context length is 1048576 tokens. However, you requested about 5537703 tokens (5531703 of text input, 6000 in the output). Please reduce the length of either one, or use the "middle-out" transform to compress your prompt automatically.

Why is {myobsidianvault/daily} having more tokens than {myobsidianvault}? This is all so confusing.

Next session, again no context: "Index myobsidianvault"

Du hast den Befehl "Index myobsidianvault" gegeben. Aktuell steht mir allerdings weiterhin nur eine Notiz zur Verfügung, nämlich die tägliche Notiz vom 2025-11-10:
Translates to: You said "index myobsidianvault", currently I only have access to one note, namely your daily note from 2025-11-10.

Next session: "What TODOs do I have in my daily notes for the last 5 days?"

I can only access the daily note for 2025-11-10. Please provide the content of your daily notes for the last 5 days if you'd like me to extract your TODOs.

After indexing my vault (OpenAI embedding)

"What todos are in my daily notes for the last 5 days {myobsidianvault}"

400 This endpoint's maximum context length is 1048576 tokens. However, you requested about 2585832 tokens (2579832 of text input, 6000 in the output). Please reduce the length of either one, or use the "middle-out" transform to compress your prompt automatically.

"What todos are in my daily notes for the last 5 days?"

I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request. The request exceeded the maximum context length for the endpoint. Please provide the daily notes for the last 5 days in smaller chunks, or specify a shorter time frame.

[DavidFarago]

I reindexed my whole vault with embedding-text-3-small and used vault QA (free) to ask "What TODOs do I have in my daily notes in the last 5 days?":

I can only access the daily note for 2025-06-08 and 2024-10-20W43 from the provided context. From the daily note of 2025-06-08, there are no TODOs. [1] From the daily note of 2024-10-20W43, the following TODOs are listed: [2] ...

I have no idea why these two notes have been picked, and no other notes.

[logancyang]

Time-based query is not available in the free vault QA mode.

I'll let @ichts answer those other questions.

[DavidFarago]

Thanks a lot for your answer, @logancyang.

So I asked "What time is it, and what date?" and got the correct response from both vault QA (free) and Chat (free), but what you are saying is that taking this date and time and doing some retrieval & filtering with it is not available in QA (free). Right? And is it available in Chat (free) -- because I have problems there, too (see above).

[logancyang]

Please read our readme and documentation, the answers to your questions should be there

https://github.com/logancyang/obsidian-copilot?tab=readme-ov-file#copilot-plusbeliever
https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en/docs