> I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend

That is not hard. It’s just tedious and very slow to do manually. The hard part would be about designing a usb dongle and ensuring that the associated software has good UX. The reason you don’t see kernel devs REing devices is not because it’s impossible or that it requires expert knowledge. It’s because it’s like counting sands on the beach.