Skill

pokeapi

Fully offline Pokédex with SQL, full-text search, type math, and a damage calculator no other Pokémon tool ships as a CLI.

Verified: 2026-05-13 (printing-press-ingest-2026-05-13+enrich-capability-skill)

When to use pokeapi

Choose if

You're building a Pokémon-related agent (trivia bot, team-builder, damage simulator, encyclopedia lookup) and want offline-after-sync access with SQL, full-text search, and damage math. Alternative: hitting pokeapi.co directly costs thousands of HTTP calls for reverse searches; this CLI mirrors the catalog to local SQLite so reasoning over the whole dataset is cheap.

Avoid if

You need competitive-battle-grade damage simulation (the calculator omits abilities, items, weather, terrain, status — explicit scope limit). Also avoid if the agent runs in a sandbox that can't persist the synced local store between sessions — every cold start re-syncs.

Risk Flags

  • LOW scope Strictly read-only — "this CLI does not create, update, delete, publish, send, or mutate remote resources." SQL access is read-only against the local store.
  • LOW data_quality Damage calculator does not model abilities, items, weather, terrain, or status — only base STAB + type effectiveness. Agents building competitive battle simulators need a richer engine.
  • LOW runtime Pokémon name lookups require dashed slugs ("mr-mime", not "Mr. Mime"). Local store must be synced first before search/SQL commands return results. Network flakiness during sync can leave partial state.

Cost

Type: Free · Free tier: PokéAPI is a public, read-only API — no keys, no tokens, no login. The CLI is MIT-licensed and free to install.

Install

Default

npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press install pokeapi
# First sync the local store, then queries run offline:
pokeapi-pp-cli sync

Setup docs →

Estimated time to first success: ~10 min

Dependencies

Minimum runtime: Node.js 18+ (or Go 1.26.3+ for source install)

Distribution

Repository
https://github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library
License
MIT