I can strongly second this. I currently work on a serverless project and running/debugging code locally is one of the biggest pain points. Over time I've gotten better at mocking out a bunch of stuff to try and get the code I care about running, but it's a really rough process.
There are of course risks that the local setup process will differ from the prod environment in a serious way. Even with good automated test coverage I feel less confident about the code I commit here than most other places I've worked.
I've used serverless and AWS chalice to build Lambda, and both have have the option to dev locally. That would be a nightmare to have to wait to deploy every time.
I would love it if you could expand on this. I currently work with AWS Lambdas a lot and have tried a couple options for running them locally but never got to a point where it was worth the effort. For example I use PyCharm and tried getting the aws serverless plugin working with it for running Lambdas and State Machines but just kept running into different problems.
There must be a better approach than setting up a bunch of mocks and running the core logic in a scratch file.
There are of course risks that the local setup process will differ from the prod environment in a serious way. Even with good automated test coverage I feel less confident about the code I commit here than most other places I've worked.