It's also just plain wrong. Even the cleanest most beautiful and efficient code is a liability. You sell software, not code.

It's all about the magnitude of the liability, not the direction

Code is an asset in the same way that any process documents in your organization are. They represent codified solutions to problems.

You do not need to re-solve this problem, and when a similar problem occurs, you can adapt the existing solution to the new problem.

Another way to think about it: if code was not an asset, we would delete it immediately after compilation.