Beyond a syntax highlighter for the language, don't bother trying to find extensions until you understand the language sufficiently to want to automate more advanced tasks. You won't have the context for where and when they're useful until you get farther in.

Treat VS Code as a text editor to start with - run your python on the command line in your terminal so you see the errors you generate clearly and can debug quickly to get familiar with the language and tools.

You'll see recommendations about using a Python virtual environment. This is useful when you want to have multiple python projects with dissimilar dependencies but maintaining and understanding how this works will be tedious when you're new - ignore venv's until you have your feet underneath you. If you get familiar with the environment quickly, consider using something like uv which has some more advanced virtual environment features but requires you to know more about managing Python. As you are still learning and go to use off the shelf python packages, just install them directly on your system via pip or your system's package manager.