Question
How do I practice DRY principle?
Quick Answer
Open your notes, journal, or documents and search for a topic you care about — decision-making, communication, focus, anything. Find two or three places where you have written substantially the same insight in different words. Write a single new note that captures the shared pattern, give it a precise name, and replace the duplicates with links to the new note.
Open your notes, journal, or documents and search for a topic you care about — decision-making, communication, focus, anything. Find two or three places where you have written substantially the same insight in different words. Write a single new note that captures the shared pattern, give it a precise name, and replace the duplicates with links to the new note. You have just performed your first epistemic refactoring.
Common pitfall: Treating every surface-level similarity as a reason to merge. Not all repetition is duplication — sometimes two ideas share vocabulary but differ in context, scope, or claim. The test is whether the underlying structure is the same, not whether the words overlap. Premature abstraction produces vague, useless generalizations. Wait until you see the pattern clearly before you name it.
This practice connects to Atomicity and Decomposition — building it as a repeatable habit compounds over time.
Learn more in these lessons
- Duplication signals missing abstraction
When you write the same idea twice you have not yet named the pattern they share.
Go beyond the answer
This topic is part of The Signal Cascade — a guided sequence of 20 lessons.
After completing this path you will run a working signal cascade: a decision-anchored definition of signal (a difference that makes a difference to a decision you own), gates tuned by position (recall at the bottom, precision at the top), knowledge stored as six-field self-validating artifacts, contradictions surfaced at save time, AI output supervised by exception with alarm-audited gates, verification debt tracked and paid down, and sessions run as thin slices with one question, a bounded working set, and an exit artifact.
Start the path →