When using Magento 2 in Developer Mode (rather than Production or Default modes) you shouldn’t need to deploy static files. Static files are automatically generated on demand when you load each page. If you are running your installation on limited resources, however, you may find that your static files will fail to be created. In my case I needed to refresh each page a number of times before each page was created fully. This made any change unnecessarily time consuming.
If you run into this problem after a change that invalidates your cache, it will save a lot of time to just delete your static files (with the exception of .htaccess) from the pub/static directory, and the redeploy using :
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f
This will definitely speed up what could be a tedious development process. So even though all of the official Magento documentation states you don’t need to redeploy your static cache files in development mode, you may need to depending on your particular situation.