Personally, I’ve never used a user.cljs and hot reloading worked fine for me. Also, I tend to run shadow-cljs watch [buildname] then connect to the repl that it runs.

a user.cljs can't do (shadow/repl :app)?

I bet it can 🙂 I'm not sure how to tell the repl to execute user.cljs

you can create a cljs/user.cljs on the classpath which the REPL include include automatically

but that still cannot execute (shadow/repl :app) so your intention of what this should be doing is unclear

I just couldn't figure out how to get the user.cljs to load at all, its not on the classpath tho so that explains it. I was also trying to figure out if user.cljs could do the init function, and failing that if there was any other way to achieve it I may not be thinking of, is all 🙂