What is pinecone-cli?

A guide to the Pinecone command-line tool, which manages Pinecone vector databases from a terminal. A vector database stores data used for similarity and text search.

Creating and managing indexes, adding or searching vectors, handling namespaces and backups, and automating Pinecone tasks in CI/CD. It also covers authentication and setup.

It lets you manage more Pinecone resource types and vector operations than the described MCP connection. It is also suited to scripts and automated build or deployment processes.

pinecone-cli — Skill for Claude Code and Cursor by pinecone-io

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.

Any agent

npx skills add pinecone-io/pinecone-cursor-plugin --skill pinecone-cli

Clone the repo

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

Made for: Claude Code, Cursor.

Or install pinecone, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills.

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-cursor-plugin/pinecone-cli/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pinecone-io/pinecone-cursor-plugin/pinecone-cli)

Your own site

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

Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,495 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.

Origin 97% copy Near-identical to another mod 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	$0.00074	$0.01495
Opus 5.5	$0.00030	$0.00598
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00015	$0.00299
Haiku 4.5	$0.00007	$0.00150

Measured 1mo ago against content hash fd3e63e63d96, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, 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 1mo 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

This is a copy

97% identical to pinecone:cli — 3 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/pinecone-cli/SKILL.md · 157 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 157 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 · 157 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 · 157 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A fd3e63e63d96

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pinecone-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository pinecone-io/pinecone-cursor-plugin (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 1,495 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 97% identical to pinecone:cli, differing in 3 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Data and AI Databases RAG and vectors agentic agentic-ai agentskills cursor retrieval-augmented-generation semantic-search

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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…

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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.

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help

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