And the reason Jurigged breaks on changes to toplevel is it's re-running the top level in its own thread... including the infinite loop that is your application.

This makes sense: it has to re-run the module's code. As long as you don't touch the module that kicks off your application it'll work fine. How can we make it work in the same module that runs the app?

One approach that seems to work is to use the: if __name__ == "__main__" guard on your app code, then modify Jurigged to change __name__ to something else upon reloading. I'm not familiar enough with Python internals to tell if changing __name__ is kosher.

Another possibility is to examine the stack and stop executing code when reaching the root of the current stack... although there's no guarantee the code has been running long enough to reach the program's infinite loop such as when the file was modified a split second after the program started.