What you’re seeing is Anaconda automatically activating the base environment in your shell. That’s why every time you open PowerShell or VS Code terminal, it starts with (base) in the prompt.

You don’t need to uninstall Anaconda — you can simply tell it not to auto-activate:

conda config --set auto_activate_base false

After running this command once, restart PowerShell/VS Code and it will open in the normal terminal without (base) showing up.

When you do want to use conda, you can still activate it manually with:

conda activate base

or switch to any other environment you’ve created.

In VS Code specifically, also make sure you’ve selected the Python interpreter you want (Ctrl + Shift + P → Python: Select Interpreter). That way it won’t keep defaulting to conda if you don’t want it to.

This way you can keep Anaconda installed for data science projects, but still have a clean, fast PowerShell/VS Code terminal for your everyday Python work.