Sure, AI has developed quickly, but let's see it take on a real engineering challenge, rather than regurgitating boilerplate code.
Writing device drivers from incomplete specs is much harder than "writing a whole application" where the specs are clearly defined and there's a lot more example code to reference. If you believe in AI so much, and believe that it's unreasonable for postmarketOS to not want to use it, put it to the test, prove the doubters wrong, what have you got to lose?
What does a developer who writes a driver from incomplete specs do? Writes some values in some registers, sees how the device behaves, updates the spec. Rinse and repeat. Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done.
Haha, are you trying to suggest you'll have lost much by putting an AI tool to the test? You seem to think it's powerful enough to do the work of porting Alpine Linux (or equivalent) to new hardware without human intervention (beyond the initial prompt), what exactly are you losing by trying this out? It's not your time, as you would have spent less time on giving a simple instruction to an AI tool than you spent in talking to me.
Perhaps the reality is that you know AI needs more hand-holding than this, and the tools aren't up to the task you're thinking of setting them.
You are also strangely fixated on today's capabilities, completely missing the exponential we are on.
In a few months will have posts here from device driver writers explaining how they hooked up a phone to an Arduino and a video camera and how the AI is automatically writing device drivers.
Writing device drivers from incomplete specs is much harder than "writing a whole application" where the specs are clearly defined and there's a lot more example code to reference. If you believe in AI so much, and believe that it's unreasonable for postmarketOS to not want to use it, put it to the test, prove the doubters wrong, what have you got to lose?