I've discovered that if you have a bug in your code that keeps other code from executing, then it looks like that other code is refusing to live reload. Definitely should have moved to other work last friday.

So it had nothing to do with Clojure or Cursive; the with-redefs I used to mock out chatting to a back-end server ended up bypassing my test code talking to an in-process front-end server. Reloading the code worked, but none of the code was getting executed. My panic on friday was adding logging code and printlns and not seeing them take effect. Now all is explained.