Testing Locally Is Slowing You Down

For some things yes - I've seen team-mates getting new products working locally and then spending lots more time getting it all working in AWS - getting it working in AWS first would have saved a lot of heart-ache.

But for a lot of stuff, testing locally should be much faster: so much of what I do is just adding/updating a REST endpoint, and spending 5 minutes building and deploying to AWS just to find out that I screwed up some loop condition is a grind. I know that for simple stuff like a REST endpoint my dev environment isn't going to meaningfully differ from AWS so that build and deploy time is just wasted.