Yes, running pytest with the --pdb flag will drop you into the debugger on an unhandled exception which gets a comparable workflow but it's not quite the same a

Yes, running pytest with the --pdb flag will drop you into the debugger on an unhandled exception which gets a comparable workflow but it's not quite the same as, a) writing tests to file first is not repl-driven development, and b) you generally have to think about doing it first. In an ideal repl-driven world you could write the test in the repl entirely and commit it to disk once you're ready.