Very much with you on this one. Even with 50k+ LoC a 'make clean;make' takes less than a second (with help from ccache and a RAM disk). It effectively gets the compiler out of the way and keeps the thought processes continuous.

One trick I like is to have a 2nd terminal watching the file(s) I'm editing, triggering a make/run on each save; building and running is then a single keypress away:-

  while [ 1 ]; do
  inotifywait -e move_self foo.c
  cc foo.c -o foo && ./foo # or 'make && ./foo'
  done