>What bothers me about posts like this is: mid-level engineers are not tasked with atomic, greenfield projects

They get those ocassionally all the time though too. Depends on the company. In some software houses it's constant "greenfield projects", one after another. And even in companies with 1-2 pieces of main established software to maintain, there are all kinds of smaller utilities or pipelines needed.

>But day to day, when I ask it "build me this feature" it uses strange abstractions, and often requires several attempts on my part to do it in the way I consider "right".

In some cases that's legit. In other cases it's just "it did it well, but not how I'd done it", which is often needless stickness to some particular style (often a contention between 2 human programmers too).

Basically, what FloorEgg says in this thread: "There are two types of right/wrong ways to build: the context specific right/wrong way to build something and an overly generalized engineer specific right/wrong way to build things."

And you can always not just tell it "build me this feature", but tell it (high level way) how to do it, and give it a generic context about such preferences too.