That's basically what the quote is implying - you should not be throwing things together and hoping it will work after debugging, but carefully designing to avoid bugs, so there won't be much if any debugging required.
An analogy to this can be found in the aviation industry: it's known that pilots do make errors and planes do crash, but such errors are treated as unacceptable and they try their hardest to minimise them. It's been a very successful strategy.
It is great when these work. Or when you have a high level team that doesn't abuse the system at all and gets things done using these strategies. I have seen too many times where the result is a system that even the creator does not fully understand. Worse, what should be simple changes turn into giant modifications of a Rube Goldberg machine.
Over the years, I had less and less use for intense debugging sessions, but I've been reading and writing logs all the time.
Today, I see server side code without logging statements, I immediately ask myself, how do the authors debug this thing?
Related:
> If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging - they should not introduce the bugs to start with.