I am playing with the two '8266 boards that I have. One is the ESP-01, the other one is the NodeMCU devkit board that is marked 'LoLin' on the bottom. Both boards are flashed to the NodeMCU Lua firmware, latest.
For the NodeMCU DevKit board, if I initiate a serial port connection the NodeMCU board in rapid succession, no more than 2 seconds between the disconnect and the following connect, it forces the board to restart. I found this out by using the nodejs based esp8266-cli tool (https://github.com/paulcuth/esp8266-cli). I like the tool because I can do things like 'esp file push filename.lua' to push a file to it, and 'esp file list' to show the list of files on the flash. Two commands in a rapid succession (for example 'esp file list' twice) cause the board to reset itself. Reliably, every time, if you do it in less than 2 seconds.
This problem is not specific to the command line tool. I did the same thing with Arduino IDE serial monitor and with Esplorer. It is sufficient to just connect-disconnect-connect quickly, and the board will reset.
My ESP-01, connected via a USB/Serial buddy with a CH340 chip, does not exhibit this behavior.
Anyone else seen this?