Pinecone Skills — Help & Overview
Pinecone is the leading vector database for building accurate and performant AI applications at scale in production. It's useful for building semantic search, retrieval augmented generation, recommendation systems, and agentic applications.
Here's everything you need to get started and a summary of all available skills.
What You Need
Required
- Pinecone account — free to create at https://app.pinecone.io/?sessionType=signup
- API key — create one in the Pinecone console after signing up, then either export it in your terminal:
export PINECONE_API_KEY="your-key"Or add it to a.envfile if your IDE doesn't inherit shell variables:PINECONE_API_KEY=your-key
Optional (unlock more capabilities)
| Tool | What it enables | Install |
|---|---|---|
| Pinecone MCP server | Use Pinecone directly inside your AI agent/IDE without writing code | Setup guide |
Pinecone CLI (pc) | Manage all index types from the terminal, batch operations, backups, CI/CD | brew tap pinecone-io/tap && brew install pinecone-io/tap/pinecone |
| uv | Run the packaged Python scripts included in these skills | Install uv |
Available Skills
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
pinecone-quickstart | Step-by-step onboarding — create an index, upload data, and run your first search |
pinecone-query | Search integrated indexes using natural language text via the Pinecone MCP |
pinecone-cli | Use the Pinecone CLI (pc) for terminal-based index and vector management |
pinecone-assistant | Create, manage, and chat with Pinecone Assistants for document Q&A with citations |
pinecone-mcp | Reference for all Pinecone MCP server tools and their parameters |
pinecone-docs | Curated links to official Pinecone documentation, organized by topic |
Which skill should I use?
Just getting started? → pinecone-quickstart
Want to search an index you already have?
- Integrated index (built-in embedding model) →
pinecone-query(uses MCP) - Any other index type →
pinecone-cli
Working with documents and Q&A? → pinecone-assistant
Need to manage indexes, bulk upload vectors, or automate workflows? → pinecone-cli
Looking up API parameters or SDK usage? → pinecone-docs
Need to understand what MCP tools are available? → pinecone-mcp