Python environments

The environment is part of the project, not scratch space. A user who opens the project tomorrow, or clones it on another machine, should find the environment where their editor, their tooling, and their habits expect it.

Where it goes

Create it inside the project directory — .venv at the project root is the convention nearly every editor and tool auto-detects:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

For a greenfield project, prefer uv, which manages a project-local .venv for you and is much faster: