I’ve had many similar frustrations about terraform, and the overall lack of visibility into what’s happening drives me mad at times.
A proper repl, with the ability to actually manage a config would be a huge step forward - I spend more time trying to figure out what vars get populated and how I can get a value into another resource than anything else. It’s like I’m constantly fighting with the HCL syntax to get what I want to happen.
If you want visibility(spoiler: it's just API calls), try using `TF_LOG=DEBUG terraform <foo>`. You might also want to set `-parallelism=1` or you'll be treated to statements printing in an order you are not expecting.
A proper repl, with the ability to actually manage a config would be a huge step forward - I spend more time trying to figure out what vars get populated and how I can get a value into another resource than anything else. It’s like I’m constantly fighting with the HCL syntax to get what I want to happen.