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It does look like there's a way to "forward" a unix domain socket over ssh enough to do that kind of debugging:

That's certainly a potential solution.

Why not have the REPL (or whatever else you're exposing to localhost) require a token for authentication of each request?

Because it's usually a raw socket, not an HTTP interface, so that's kind of tricky. But it could work.

Networked REPL doesn't preclude security. See eg Twisted's SSH based twisted.conch.manhole

Yeah, but until you linked that, I'd never seen a networked REPL that actually provided it.