The whole "code is a liability" mantra needs challenging IMO - it's too simplistic and "cargo culty". It's a misappropriation of a financial accounting term (where Assets = Liabilities + Equity) and liability also carries with it all kinds of negative associations.

It has a value in making businesses aware that production code has an operational cost just to keep it "alive". And it's useful for tempering junior developers who haven't yet absorbed principles like KISS and YAGNI.

But it fails to factor in the relation between code and an organisations ability to make (or save) money from that code. For example the capabilities of your code may be a competitive edge for your business. 10 lines of code which uses CPU and memory inefficiently may end up being more expensive than 1000 lines of code which uses CPU and memory _efficiently_ and leads to lower infrastructure costs as usage grows.

As far as I'm aware the term goes back to 2007 - https://web.archive.org/web/20070420113817/http://blog.objec... - a time where businesses hadn't really understood how to manage software based businesses, so it was a useful concept to help management become more mature about how they think about software.

But these days knowledge of how to run software based businesses is far more widespread - we don't need to simplify our thinking to "code is a liability".