Front-end is so much more than building designs

if a high fidelity mockup has just been put together without planning and circular communication between developers, designers, project managers and clients/stakeholders then there will be massive oversights

Spot on in my experience. If you don’t build together, you get:

complicated interaction[s] that would be simplified with content strategy or content that follows no logical order, but looks nice, visually

But the larger point his one about process: a deliberate, slower process for “building designs” gives him precious time to actually think about what he’s doing.

it takes me ages to even get to the point of writing code and that’s been the case for a lot of years now. The benefit to being like this though is I get to put out fires before they even start. If I’m racing along trying to write code as fast as possible, I’m gonna start plenty of fires instead.

It does feel, sometimes, like we’ve made everything available at our fingertips so quickly, that we don't take the time to actually stop and think about what we’re doing. It’s just GO! GO DEVELOPER GO!