I consider a lot of my cleverness when writing code is aimed at achieving functionality, performance, conciseness, etc., while being easy to understand and self-debugged by design. The latter meaning:

• Types enforce safety

• Very tight dependencies

• A tight design (value, store, control flows) where most bugs are likely to be catastrophic, or at least highly visible, as apposed to silent. It works, or it doesn't.

• Use naming and code organization first, concise comments second, and a page or two of doc if all else fails, to make any non-intuitive optimization or operation intuitive again. (Clarify as needed: what it does, how it does it, and why that specific method was chosen.)

That seems so basic to writing the "most cleverest" code, that the quote makes little sense to me.

I spend a very small percentage of my time debugging, outside of the real-time development-time write, run, correct loop. If debugging ever took a significant fraction of time, it would give me some serious anxiety.