As governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo made a relentless push to expand computer science in K-12 education, part of an effort to train more students to code.

The Computer Science for All initiative was meant to be a response to market demands, but less than a decade later, Raimondo admits that the idea might have been a dud.

During a forum on industrial policy and economic security at the Harvard Institute of Politics this week, Raimondo acknowledged as much to former Treasury secretary and Harvard professor Larry Summers.

“For a long time, everyone said, 'let’s make everybody a coder,'” Raimondo said. “We’re going to predict this is where the skills are going to be. Everyone should be a software coder. I don’t know, it doesn’t look necessarily like a super idea right now with AI.”

Raimondo was responding to a question about investing in research and development versus the government picking specific companies to invest in. She was critical of President Trump’s strategy of having the US take a stake in companies, although she defended the Biden administration’s handling of subsidies through the CHIPS and Science Act.

“You could pick 100 different examples,” Raimondo said. “The government gets it wrong a lot.”

Raimondo launched the computer science initiative as governor in 2016 to ensure that it was part of every student’s experience in Rhode Island. It was a trendy – and widely praised – strategy at the time.

Over the summer, The New York Times published a story about how the high-paying tech jobs that coders across the country were promised have disappeared, in part because of the rise of AI.

Raimondo’s comments about coding were only a small part of her broader discussion with Summers. You can watch the whole conversation by clicking the image below. Come for the economic policy talk, stay for her advice on handling the Rhode Island General Assembly.