I believe the key is not only looking at the code, but the semantics behind the code. Two pieces of code might look alike at a structural level, but maybe have

I believe the key is not only looking at the code, but the semantics behind the code. Two pieces of code might look alike at a structural level, but maybe have different variable names, etc. because addressing different needs that happen to have the same solution _right now_. You can have similar solutions to different problems, but only when you confirm you’re actually dealing with a _single_ problem disguised as two is that you can be confident in deduplicating solutions. As always, the trick is focusing on the problems instead of solutions.