pinecone:cli

A guide to the Pinecone command-line tool, which manages Pinecone vector databases from a terminal. Vector databases store numerical representations used for similarity search; the guide covers indexes, vectors, namespaces, backups, accounts, and automation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to authenticate, select projects, create or manage indexes, add or query vectors, work with namespaces, make backups, and script Pinecone tasks in CI/CD.
Why use it?
It provides terminal-based instructions for Pinecone operations, including tasks that the described MCP interface does not support.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin/cli
Any agent
npx skills add pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin --skill cli
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,503 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00075 $0.01503
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00751
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00301
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00150

Measured 2d ago against content hash f8e9572bec94, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pinecone:cli scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/cli/SKILL.md · 158 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pinecone CLI (pc)

Manage Pinecone from the terminal. The CLI is especially valuable for vector operations across all index types — something the MCP currently can't do.

CLI vs MCP

CLI MCP
Index types All (standard, integrated, sparse) Integrated only
Vector ops (upsert, query, fetch, update, delete)
Text search on integrated indexes
Backups, namespaces, org/project mgmt
CI/CD / scripting

Setup

Install (macOS)

brew tap pinecone-io/tap
brew install pinecone-io/tap/pinecone

Other platforms (Linux, Windows) — download from GitHub Releases.

Authenticate

# Interactive (recommended for local dev)
pc login
pc target -o "my-org" -p "my-project"

# Service account (recommended for CI/CD)
pc auth configure --client-id "$PINECONE_CLIENT_ID" --client-secret "$PINECONE_CLIENT_SECRET"

# API key (quick testing)
pc config set-api-key $PINECONE_API_KEY

Check status: pc auth status · pc target --show

Note for agent sessions: If you need to run pc login inside an agent loop, the browser auth link may not surface correctly. It's best to authenticate before starting an agent session. Run pc login in your terminal directly, then invoke the agent once you're authenticated.

Authenticating the CLI does not set PINECONE_API_KEY

pc login authenticates the CLI tool itself — it does not set PINECONE_API_KEY in your environment. Python scripts, Node.js SDKs, and other tools that use the Pinecone SDK need PINECONE_API_KEY set separately.

Use the CLI to create a key and export it in one step:

KEY=$(pc api-key create --name agent-sdk-key --json | jq -r '.value')
export PINECONE_API_KEY="$KEY"

Without jq: run pc api-key create --name agent-sdk-key --json and copy the "value" field manually.


Common Commands

Task Command
List indexes pc index list
Create serverless index pc index create -n my-index -d 1536 -m cosine -c aws -r us-east-1
Index stats pc index stats -n my-index
Upload vectors from file pc index vector upsert -n my-index --file ./vectors.json
Query by vector pc index vector query -n my-index --vector '[0.1, ...]' -k 10 --include-metadata
Query by vector ID pc index vector query -n my-index --id "doc-123" -k 10
Fetch vectors by ID pc index vector fetch -n my-index --ids '["vec1","vec2"]'
List vector IDs pc index vector list -n my-index
Delete vectors by filter pc index vector delete -n my-index --filter '{"genre":"classical"}'
List namespaces pc index namespace list -n my-index
Create backup pc backup create -i my-index -n "my-backup"
JSON output (for scripting) Add -j to any command

Read the full file on GitHub · 158 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 158 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A f8e9572bec94

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pinecone:cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin (68 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 1,503 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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