Sea Limited is rolling out OpenAI’s Codex across its entire developer organisation, with internal data showing 87% of users are weekly active users — a deployment the company’s co-founder describes not as a productivity upgrade but as a structural shift in how engineering teams build and operate at scale.
David Chen, Co-Founder of Sea and Chief Product Officer at its e-commerce arm Shopee, said the company is moving beyond using AI as an autocomplete tool and embedding agentic workflows directly into its CI/CD pipelines, where AI agents reason through product requirements, propose test-driven implementations, surface edge cases in distributed systems, and accelerate debugging cycles.
From typing faster to thinking better
Sea operates across hyper-localised, multilingual markets with large microservices architectures. According to Chen, the primary friction for engineers in such environments is not writing syntax but tracing dependencies, understanding legacy logic, and maintaining reliability under peak loads. Codex, he said, functions as a “localised knowledge engine” that reduces the time it takes engineers to navigate unfamiliar services and shifts their cognitive load toward architectural design and product innovation.
Internal feedback among developers who rated Codex four or five out of five showed that 73% would recommend it to colleagues. Chen said the more meaningful signal is that engineers are using AI to drive engineering discipline — rapidly prototyping alternative implementations, generating exhaustive test coverage, and systematically paying down technical debt alongside shipping new features.
Southeast Asia as proving ground for AI-native development
Chen argues that Southeast Asia’s structural complexity — fragmented commerce, payment, logistics, and communication networks spanning multiple languages and regulatory environments — makes it an ideal environment for proving out AI-native software development at scale. He anticipates a fundamental reconfiguring of engineering teams, where developers evolve into “system orchestrators” spending the bulk of their time on product judgment, system design, and managing AI-driven workflows rather than implementation.
“This is not simply a tooling upgrade; it is an organisational paradigm shift. The winners will be those who relentlessly redesign their engineering culture and workflows around human-AI collaboration today, rather than bolting it onto legacy processes tomorrow.” — David Chen, Co-Founder, Sea Limited
Regional hackathon series to democratise access
Beyond its internal rollout, Sea has partnered with OpenAI to host a regional Codex Hackathon Series across Asia, beginning in Singapore before moving to Indonesia, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Chen framed the initiative as an effort to democratise access to advanced AI development tools and build a compounding AI-native talent ecosystem across Southeast Asia — lowering the barrier for local developers to move from experimentation to deploying scalable, AI-native applications.
