Girls Who Code CEO Tarika Barrett says AI skepticism can be a strength

For more than a decade, the nonprofit Girls Who Code has sought to help prepare young women for jobs in the tech industry and push for greater gender parity in computer science. The arrival of artificial intelligence, though, promises a new era of organization, one that involves wrestling with student pessimism about the technology—and a shift in what it even means to code. To say the least, many young graduates aren’t excited about working with AI. Instead, students—primed by tech executives who say their frontier labs stand to automate away many careers—are booing graduation speakers who bring up large language models (LLMs). Even computer science majors who still want to join the ranks of Silicon Valley face an uncertain future, since AI is rapidly reducing the number of coders that companies actually need. Another incommodious dynamic is that women, disproportionately, seem to be biased against using the technology. There are myriad reasons for this apprehension: Many are anxious about AI’s capacity to make errors, or are turned off by AI’s energy demands and its potential to supercharge the already-massive influence of tech billionaires. As a result, there seems to be a gap in AI usage, particularly along gender lines. Tarika Barrett, the outgoing CEO of Girls Who Code, knows her organization sits at the center of many of these tensions. When asked about uneasiness toward AI—particularly among women and girls—she says people shouldn’t disregard their real worries about the tech and should instead harness those concerns to guide their approach. “We have a deeply held belief that the quality of our technology, the future of AI in particular, depends on who’s going to build it,” says Barrett, who will be leaving the organization this summer. “It means that young people should be at the forefront, given its impact on every possible sector of our lives.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. We hear a lot about vibe coding. When you think abou