Sea exec says Codex helps devs 'think better,' not just code faster

Sea Limited, the Southeast Asian tech giant behind Shopee and Garena, is rolling out OpenAI’s Codex across its engineering teams, and internal data shows 87% of developers are using it weekly. But for Sea, this isn’t about typing faster. In a conversation with David Chen, the company’s Co-Founder and CPO at Shopee, he explained that in their massive microservices architecture—operating across hyper-localized markets—the real bottleneck isn’t syntax, it’s the cognitive load of navigating complex dependencies and legacy code. Codex acts like a ‘localized knowledge engine,’ letting engineers shift focus from tracing bugs to higher-level architectural and product thinking. Chen notes that developers are using Codex to ‘think better,’ not just autocomplete. Increasingly, the tool is being integrated into CI/CD pipelines, where AI agents autonomously reason through requirements, suggest test-driven implementations, and surface edge cases. Why it matters: Sea’s experience shows that for companies operating at scale in fragmented markets, AI-assisted development isn’t just a productivity hack—it’s becoming a structural necessity for managing complexity and accelerating innovation.