Most developers now use coding assistants. I do too—Copilot at work, Claude Code at home. As a developer, I prefer not to repeat myself. This post explains why and how to avoid repetition as a skill. Don’t Repeat Yourself The DRY principle has been present in the software development field for ages. The idea is that if you copy and paste code in multiple places and a bug appears, you’ll need to fix the bug in all these places.