Pinecone Help

---
name: pinecone-help
description: 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 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:
  ```bash
  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)
… load the full skill through Skill Me