I may be imagining, but did we ever have a mechanism to pipe into Pants and use the built-in Python, as a user? Like

pants export

a symlink to our python, or something equally crazy?

The built-in (ie provided by scie-pants) Python interpreter is only relatively recent, so I’d expect we have lost any features there: if we don’t have it now, we probably never had it.

Yeah, good call - though, maybe I can do some introspection on the scie binary and extract the manifest to point at the interpreter on disk

What’s the bigger context for what you’re trying to do?

For the vscode plugin, there are a handful of things I'd rather not have to port to typescript - and rather than adding a python config, it would be easier to use a built-in python (with as little complexity as possible). Knowing that pants is installed as a prerequisite, means there is a guaranteed python interpreter available