Developers Reevaluate DRY Principle In AI-Assisted Development

A thought-experiment essay revisits the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle amid rising AI-assisted development, arguing that AI tools that semantically index and synchronize duplicated code cannot eliminate the need for DRY. Because AI-driven code generation inflates codebases faster than context windows grow—LLM windows have grown from 4K tokens to over a million—DRY remains necessary as a context-management strategy to limit coupling and long-term divergence.