Comment by skybrian
One thing I like to see is a 'dry run' like 'make -n'. Although, maybe that's not possible in all cases.
Another possibility might be to output a something like a shell script that would do a rebuild the same way, so you can see what it did and hack it when debugging.
Yes. Dry runs at least, and better yet terraform-style planning that produces an artifact that can be applied. These should really be more common with all kinds of software