"conversing with a living system" aka "using a common debugging tool"
Only if your debugging tool supports hot code reloading without changing execution context, updating live references, and is able to save the session across executions.
I don't understand. Are you saying that you think that writing Common Lisp is akin to using a debugger in other programming languages?
REPLs aren't debuggers.
Only if your debugging tool supports hot code reloading without changing execution context, updating live references, and is able to save the session across executions.