Some jobs may write data, or perform operations of limited capacity, like pushing to a repo, uploading files to a server, or starting a remote task that costs money (e.g. AI credits). Having some way to dry-run/test a build while skipping potentially volatile/costly steps would be useful.

My usecase is testing my builds with tod. My build has steps that write to remote locations. I either have to live with that and clean up afterwards; remove the steps I don't want (a painful process) before running with tod, and restore any changes before committing; or maintain a separate test build, and manually sync changes between the two. All three options are not fun.