A conversation with David Chen, Co-Founder of Sea and Chief Product Officer at Shopee.

Sea Limited (Sea) is a leading global tech company founded in Singapore, with businesses spanning digital entertainment, e-commerce, and digital financial services. Its engineering teams build and operate products at significant scale across some of the world’s most dynamic markets.

Sea is rolling out Codex across its developer organisation, with our internal data showing 87% of users are weekly active users. For the company, AI-assisted software development is not simply a way to improve productivity at the margins, but a deeper shift in how engineering teams navigate complexity, build resilient systems, and move from ideas to implementation.

We spoke with David Chen, Co-Founder of Sea and Chief Product Officer at Sea's e-commerce business, Shopee, about why the company is making this bet, how AI agents are changing how its developers work, and what AI-native software development could mean for Southeast Asia and the broader Asia Pacific region.

At Sea’s scale, engineering isn’t just about writing code. It’s about managing large-scale systemic complexity across fragmented, hyper-localized markets. We see the ongoing developments in AI leading to a fundamental shift in how software is created and how our engineering teams operate at scale.

Agentic AI coding tools like Codex are not just about improving localised productivity. They represent a structural multiplier that can help our engineering organisation ramp up speed, responsiveness, and effectiveness amid an increasingly complex operating environment.

What stood out was its ability to go beyond autocomplete and provide deep contextual awareness of our large and disparate codebases.

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