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The most time wasteful part of programming is debugging. Writing slowly and thinking through your options and double checking what you wrote saves time. Especially since you are doing this while writing and you have the complete picture in your head. Obviously it does not catch everything. But one should strive to minimize detective work.

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After I've been programming for an entire day I will rely on the compile to tell me when I'm wrong with an assumption. I'm honestly trying to conserve mental energy so I've learned that it's better to do it from the start and avoid keeping track of as much stuff as possible in my head. The compile tells me something's wrong somewhere and I go fix it and move on. That's not detective work, at least it doesn't feel like it to me since it's so quick.

Turning off parts of your brain is generally not a great idea when the goal is to write code that works. A better way to conserve mental energy would be to take a break, go for a walk, or just context switch for a while.

You are talking about compiling he is talking about running. Finding issues from running results in detective work.

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