This doesn't work the moment the module you're importing something imports something else that you've changed.

Worse, you can't redine methods, because the classes get "redefined". This means that you need to first redefine classes, then "reload" (hoping it doesn't break for to silly implementation limitations mentioned above), then initialize objects, then retest.

Obviously this is quite painful which is why I use this decorator to mimic Lisp's defmethod to patch methods on "live" objects without class redefinition,

https://gist.github.com/akssri/431f2dfe037bbdbb3c8668872edfd...

What I did recently when developing a TUI was that I put the state in a dict, start the app in an infinite loop and whenever it quit, reload module, keep the state and instantiate the class with that state again. Something like this:

    import tui
    state = {"current_step_index": 0, "variables": None}
    while True:
        app = tui.App(state)
        tui.run()
        state = app.get_state()
        importlib.reload(tui)

Pickling + unpickling the object is a neat trick to update objects to point to the new methods, but it's even more straightforward to just patch `obj.__class__ = reloaded_module.NewClass`. This is what ipython's autoreload extension used to do (and still does in some circumstances, along with other tricks to patch up old references), though nowadays it's had some improvements over this approach: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/pull/14500