The reason I became a programmer was to not have a repetitive lifestyle and I think it's pretty easy to accomplish that. I always have new problems to solve which require new techniques to be used and anything that gets done repetitively? Just automate it.

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).