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"
  

Optional (unlock more capabilities)

Tool	What it enables	Install
Pinecone MCP server	Use Pinecone directly inside your AI agent/IDE without writing code	Already installed for you in Gemini CLI!
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
quickstart	Step-by-step onboarding — create an index, upload data, and run your first search
query	Search integrated indexes using natural language text via the Pinecone MCP
cli	Use the Pinecone CLI (pc) for terminal-based index and vector management
assistant	Create, manage, and chat with Pinecone Assistants for document Q&A with citations
mcp	Reference for all Pinecone MCP server tools and their parameters
pinecone-docs	Curated links to official Pinecone documentation, organized by topic

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Which skill should I use?

Just getting started? → quickstart

Want to search an index you already have?

• Integrated index (built-in embedding model) → query (uses MCP)
• Any other index type → cli

Working with documents and Q&A? → assistant

Need to manage indexes, bulk upload vectors, or automate workflows? → cli

Looking up API parameters or SDK usage? → pinecone-docs

Need to understand what MCP tools are available? → mcp

Issues using Pinecone here?

• Make sure you export your API key in addition to configuring it for usage with the MCP. If you don't, you won't be able to run the packaged scripts here.
• If skills are not being automatically invoked, you may need to explicitly inform Gemini CLI of your intent. Try saying "Use the quickstart skill", or "Use the Pinecone Docs skill", when having issues routing requests.