What is pinecone:quickstart?

A guided first project for Pinecone, a service that stores data for meaning-based search. It offers a database path for indexing and querying data, or an assistant path for asking questions about uploaded documents.

Use it to create an integrated Pinecone search index, add data with Python, and query it. You can also use it to create a Pinecone Assistant for document questions.

It removes the need to figure out Pinecone setup and first steps alone. The walkthrough helps new developers verify access and try a complete example.

pinecone:quickstart — Skill for Claude Code by pinecone-io

Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin/quickstart

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pinecone, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills, 1 command, 1 hook, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin/quickstart/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin/quickstart)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin/quickstart"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin/quickstart/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin/quickstart"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin/quickstart.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,213 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

high Privilege Escalation · line 20
Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.

Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
high Privilege Escalation · line 84
Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.

Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
high Privilege Escalation · line 210
Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.

Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.

How audits are shown

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00079	$0.02213
Opus 5.5	$0.00032	$0.00885
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00016	$0.00443
Haiku 4.5	$0.00008	$0.00221

Measured 1mo ago against content hash e2335071734d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pinecone:quickstart 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 1mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/quickstart_complete.py, scripts/upsert.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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:

pinecone-quickstart — 91% identical, 37 lines differ
pinecone-quickstart — 91% identical, 31 lines differ
quickstart — 88% identical, 36 lines differ

skills/quickstart/SKILL.md · 231 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 231 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pinecone Quickstart

Welcome! This skill walks you through your first Pinecone experience using the tools available to you. In this quickstart, you will learn how to do a simple form of semantic search over some example data.

Whenever this skill asks the user to choose between options, confirm a destructive step, or pick from a list, use the AskUserQuestion tool rather than plain prose. Fall back to prose only if the tool is unavailable.

Prerequisites

Before starting either path, verify the API key works by calling list-indexes via the Pinecone MCP. If it succeeds, proceed. If it fails, ask the user to set their key:

Run export PINECONE_API_KEY="your-key" in your terminal. Claude Code reads your shell environment, so this is enough.
To use a .env file instead, run scripts with uv run --env-file .env scripts/....

Then retry list-indexes to confirm.

Step 0: Choose Your Path

Ask the user which path they want:

Database – Build a vector search index. Best for developers who want to store and search embeddings. Uses the Pinecone MCP + a Python upsert script.
Assistant – Build a document Q&A assistant. Best for users who want to upload files and ask questions with cited answers. No code required.

Path A: Database Quickstart

For each step, explain to the user what will happen. An overview is here:

Check if MCP is set
Create an integrated index with MCP
Upsert sample data using the bundled script (9 sentences across productivity, health, and nature themes)
Run a semantic search query and explore further queries
Optionally try reranking
Offer the complete standalone script

Step 1 – Verify MCP is Available

The prerequisite check already called list-indexes. If it succeeded, the MCP is working — proceed to Step 2.

If it failed because MCP tools were unavailable (not an auth error):

Tell the user the MCP server needs to be configured
Point them to: https://docs.pinecone.io/reference/tools/mcp

Read the full file on GitHub · 231 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.

1mo ago First seen · 231 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A e2335071734d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pinecone:quickstart is a skill published in the GitHub repository pinecone-io/pinecone-claude-code-plugin (69 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 2,213 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Claude Code Data and AI Databases RAG and vectors hybrid-search mcp pinecone retrieval-augmented-generation semantic-search

help

Overview of all available Pinecone skills and what a user needs to get started. Invoke when a user asks what skills are available, how to get started with Pinecone, or what they need to set up before using any Pinecone skill.

pinecone-io/gemini-cli-extension · 50 tokens

pinecone-quickstart

Interactive Pinecone quickstart for new developers. Choose between two paths - Database (create an integrated index, upsert data, and query using Pinecone MCP + Python) or Assistant (create a Pinecone Assistant for document Q&A). Use when a user wants to get started with Pinecone for the first time or wants a guided…

pinecone-io/skills · 79 tokens

quickstart

pinecone-io/gemini-cli-extension · 76 tokens

pinecone-cli

Guide for using the Pinecone CLI (pc) to manage Pinecone resources from the terminal. The CLI supports ALL index types (standard, integrated, sparse) and all vector operations — unlike the MCP which only supports integrated indexes. Use for batch operations, vector management, backups, namespaces, CI/CD automation…

pinecone-io/skills · 74 tokens

pinecone-mcp

Reference for the Pinecone MCP server tools. Documents all available tools - list-indexes, describe-index, describe-index-stats, create-index-for-model, upsert-records, search-records, cascading-search, and rerank-documents. Use when an agent needs to understand what Pinecone MCP tools are available, how to use them…

pinecone-io/skills · 80 tokens

cli

pinecone-io/gemini-cli-extension · 72 tokens