Fortune ran a story a few days ago that quietly confirmed what a lot of us have been saying for months. Headline: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are walking back their earlier predictions that AI would eliminate most software engineering jobs. The quotes are striking. Altman now says "it's more nuanced." Amodei says "engineering judgment remains essential." This is the same Altman who, not that long ago, was giving interviews about how future software engineers would mostly "tell a computer what to do." The same Amodei whose public timeline for AI replacing coders was aggressive enough to make headlines everywhere. And now they are walking it back. Not because the technology got worse. Because the real world happened. why they said it in the first place Let me be blunt about something: the apocalyptic AI predictions were never neutral analysis. They were fundraising speeches with a statistics veneer.…