I built a little harness for an x86 SBC for Claude to do osdev a few months ago.

Janky setup with two ESPs for the serial terminal and to control a servo taped to some microswitches to power cycle the board.

It worked very well, allowing Claude to spend all day and night debugging quirks with the NIC until it was able to get the driver working.

So, I think giving your IoT device some "hands" is probably worth it. For SD card automation, you can find "wireless SD cards" on Amazon/AliExpress that have a microcontroller pretending to be sd card, eg FYSETC SD-Wifi.