While you do not need software devs for a button, once you have enough buttons doing enough things controlling them with a computer becomes much easier than controlling them using mechanical circuitry. This is the whole reason for SBCs like the Arduino, so people can make the transitionary step between “my project is simple enough to have physical logic built into it” and “my project is so complex it no longer makes sense for me to hand build the logic”

If you haven’t messed with physical logic gates before, I recommend it! If you don’t have a physical workspace to do it in, Minecraft actually Makes a ‘great’ sandbox for playing with logic circuits. Superflat Creative worlds are the bomb for that.

Start with a simple yes gate, then learn a not gate, then an And, then an Or, and build up from there!

You’ll find very quickly that once you need persistence involved, projects with physical logic can scale massively with each additional bit of storage added. Doing something with that storage? Good luck! As a result, nowadays we pay someone for a tiny computer they already made, and program it to make our buttons do stuff, instead of just having the buttons do stuff directly.

Edit: removed a word, analog does not mean mechanical, mea culpa.