Python Environment Manager lost Python interpreter conda env

Played the detective game for a while. Python Environment Manager is a VSCode extension manages Python environments and packages in a handy fashion.

The answer is that I assumed the conda env creation includes a clean Python installation itself, which is not true.

If you don’t specify “you really need Python here” when creating a new condo env, it won’t have any default python interpreter ready. For example, in Jupyter notebook, you probably won’t find the kernel from that newly created env.

In short, do

$ conda create --name newenv python=3.10

or simpler:

$ conda create --name newenv python

but never:

$ conda create --name newenv