For me I build my code with little steps and I rarely need to debug it. In a project I finished few days ago I wrote over 30 pages of assembly program (dsPIC) and it worked without debugging. I just code a small step, test it to see if it produced required output and correct till it works then go one step further and so on till all project is finished. This is how I avoid debugging.
If you write your code all at once and it most probably won't work, then you will be having a hard time trying to figure what parts of code is the problem.
Mahmood