Now I’m just wondering if I could remove the PIP install at the very beginning, so it starts straightaway

AbruptCow41 CLEARML_AGENT_SKIP_PYTHON_ENV_INSTALL=1 does exactly that 🙂 BTW, I would just set the venv cache and this means it will just be able to restore the entire thing (even if you have changed the requirements
https://github.com/allegroai/clearml-agent/blob/077148be00ead21084d63a14bf89d13d049cf7db/docs/clearml.conf#L115