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.

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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 .env file 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

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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-full-text-search	Build a full-text-search index — schema design, safe bulk ingestion, and query construction (text / query_string / dense / sparse scoring with text-match and metadata filters). Preview API (2026-01.alpha); requires pinecone Python SDK ≥ 9.0.
pinecone-docs	Curated links to official Pinecone documentation, organized by topic

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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

Building a full-text search index (BM25-style keyword/phrase matching, optionally combined with dense or sparse vectors)? → pinecone-full-text-search (preview API, needs pinecone Python SDK ≥ 9.0)

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