I think DRY is one of the first pieces of advice that many programmers come across. Taking it to heart as a beginner it has the advantage of encouraging you to

I think DRY is one of the first pieces of advice that many programmers come across. Taking it to heart as a beginner it has the advantage of encouraging you to sometimes stop and give a bit more thought to what you are actually doing. Is this essentially the same as what I'm doing over there? How is it different? Why is it different? Etc... As you gather experience you can recognise these patterns more easily and develop a stronger intuition for when you should pursue a DRY approach or just leave things as they are. You might even choose to make two things even more similar so that they feel more familiar (i.e. choosing to be even less DRY!)