Even better is: Know your performance goals going in and choose your tools and approaches accordingly.
You still mostly want to follow the rough priority above. You absolutely may prototype to convince yourself a performance goal can be met early on, but if the goal is high performance code you are still far better off making the first pass for correctness. Skipping this step often leads to highly performant code that is wrong, and is a pain in the ass to debug.
The "make it work, then make it right, then make it fast" mantra is both overly simplistic and deeply true.
You still mostly want to follow the rough priority above. You absolutely may prototype to convince yourself a performance goal can be met early on, but if the goal is high performance code you are still far better off making the first pass for correctness. Skipping this step often leads to highly performant code that is wrong, and is a pain in the ass to debug.
The "make it work, then make it right, then make it fast" mantra is both overly simplistic and deeply true.