There is nothing currently written in the dev stages policy to exclude any specific types of coding contributions, or limit it to any specific projects.
I think creating such a limitation now would be a slippery slope, and will discourage people from doing other types of coding, such as on distributions, or QA/test platforms, the SDK, experimental clients, release engineering, etc. But if the engineering team disagrees, at a minimum these “more special” projects should at least be identified in the policy so people aren’t disappointed after their hard work.