How to find the Python interpreter

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