Why AI Made Me Respect Developers Even More

I am not a developer, and I do not think I will become one.

What tools like Claude Code and Codex have changed for me is not my role. It is more that they let me see more of the work underneath the work.

If I ask them to build something and then explain what they are doing step by step, or explain it like I am five, I suddenly get much more visibility into what is actually going on. Not just the end result, but all the little decisions around naming, structure, dependencies, edge cases, trade-offs, and why one version is safer or cleaner than another.

Honestly, that has made me respect developers even more.

From the outside, it is very easy to reduce development to something like "build this feature" or "just connect the API" or "fix this bug." But the more I use these tools, the more obvious it becomes that good engineering is full of judgement calls. Even simple-looking things can contain loads of small decisions that only really show themselves later, when something breaks, gets harder to maintain, or needs to scale.

So AI has not made me feel like development is easy. More the opposite.

It has made me realise how much good developers are actually carrying in their heads all the time, and how much craft sits underneath work that can look very straightforward from the outside.

That matters a lot to me as a Product Owner.

I do not need to become a developer. But I do want to understand enough to collaborate better, write clearer requirements, ask better questions, and not be casual about the difficulty of the work. These tools help with that. They help me learn faster without pretending generated code is the same thing as real expertise.

So for me, the value is not that AI makes me technical.

It is that it helps me see the craft more clearly, and respect it properly.