Sorry, my point wasn't that liability doesn't have a meaning in finance. My read of the quote is that it uses liability in the sense of risk not debt on a balance sheet.
I could always be wrong though, that was just my interpretation of it. I don't get how code could be a liability in the financial sense, but I do get how every line of code risks bugs and other issues.
Sure, but all code is a potential future debt.
You wrote a music player that only allows one artist from list of all artists? Tech debt.
You wrote optimized assembly for x86_64? It's the year 2060, and we only support NGPU_ARM_N_LEG.
The moment your expectations change (which is all the time), your code needs to be changed, and effort isn't free.
Tech debt is not part of a financial account or disclosure though. Yes those are forms of debt, no they aren't financial debts or financial liabilities.
I don't think it's a wrong quote. Code's behavior is the asset, and code's source is the liability. You want to achieve maximum functionality for minimal source code investment.