DRY

DRY stands for “don’t repeat yourself”. In software, it means every piece of knowledge should have a single, authoritative representation, so a change is made in one place. In content, the same principle applies to definitions, policy wording, product copy, service descriptions, statistics, instructions and guidance. If the same fact or passage exists in five places, those five places eventually start disagreeing with one another.

DRY doesn’t mean everything should be written only once, in identical words. Sometimes repetition is useful for readers. What needs one authoritative home is the underlying fact, decision or source, even if it’s expressed in different ways for different contexts.

Why it matters for content

DRY reduces drift, contradiction and needless maintenance. It helps teams update information once rather than hunting for every copy, and it makes content easier to govern because there’s less ambiguity about which version is the right one. It’s especially valuable where the same information appears across channels, teams or formats.

The facts and assets that change over time need it most: prices, statistics, policy wording, service descriptions, eligibility criteria, boilerplate copy, brand guidance and recurring explanations. They’re also the things organisations copy and paste most freely.

How AI changes the picture

Generating a new copy of something now costs almost nothing, while maintaining it costs what it always did. Ask an assistant for a fresh eligibility summary for a campaign page and you get a near-duplicate, worded slightly differently, that nobody will remember to update when the criteria change. Retrieval adds a second problem: a chatbot that finds three versions of the same policy may quote the oldest, or blend them into a fourth that appears nowhere.

Used well, AI supports DRY: it can rework one structured source into a summary, an FAQ answer or a social post, each drawn from the same original. That depends on there being a reliable original to draw from.