I was more referring to the repetitive nature of CRUD apps and how work sort of repeats at a high level but details are different enough that it feels a little repetitive. Also keeping tests isolated tends to lead to repetition since you don't really want dependencies there.
Although I do completely agree that about 90% of my work is actually thinking about how to implement a problem as opposed to actually implementing it.
If you're rewriting tens of functions that are almost identical, you should probably consider finding a different way of organising your code (even if there are minor differences between the functions).