You can't stop IntelliJ from saving work. I like to kick of a build, and work on some new stuff while it's going on without saving until the build completes. That workflow is impossible in IntelliJ. You have to down tools, for a long build with lots of tests that can make IntelliJ slower over all. IntelliJ generally more responsive for most work, but that's because it's not using Java's type system to find errors as you work, errors are deferred, which often means they take longer over all to fix.