I started a deps.edn project finally and trying to get a similar workflow I had with lein repl. With lein repl it had an :init-ns option where I would start my whole app and I can just use cider-connect and have the whole context loaded already to eval anything anywhere in the codebase immediately. From what I'm seeing from all the docs, you should use cider-jack-in or have a :cider-clj alias but this doesn't bring in any context of the app, basically just giving you a repl with nothing loaded. I've worked around this by having a main function from my dev profile that will launch a repl that I can connect to and everything is already started. I feel I spent a bit too much time to arrive to this and there may be an easier way. What are you guys doing?

(defn -main [& args] 
 (spit ".nrepl-port" 39000)
  (nrepl-server/start-server :port 39000
                             :handler (apply nrepl-server/default-handler
                                             (map resolve (concat
                                                           ['refactor-nrepl.middleware/wrap-refactor]
                                                           cider.nrepl/cider-middleware))))
  (core/-main args))