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Start free trial →Fallthrough · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
The hosts were discussing a forum thread in which someone dismissed the Ghostty terminal emulator as vibe-coded slop. Kris argues that neither term has a stable definition, and that engineers, who like correctness, will have to live with that.
Like calling that AI slop is just, I mean, fundamentally wrong. Calling it vibe coded is fundamentally wrong.
…than like just full on maximalist. But yeah, I think, I think it was a little bit of a disappointing thread to read. I think the definition of slop was just combined, was just conflated with everything else. And, you know, the concept that anything in Ghosty is vibe coded is just factually untrue.
Yeah. I also think the assertion that there are so many alternatives to libghosty, I don't think there are, right? There are other terminal emulation libraries, but the reason that Mitchell did all of this is because they are all broken in some way. They don't do things correctly. So, and that's why there's a lot of big projects that are switching over to libghosty as their engine for their terminal emulation emulator. So in the same way that like, oh, you can only use Linux in certain places. I think that also applies to libghosty if you actually want correctness in your terminal emulation, which I think is what you want. So I think people, people, and this dude specifically, I would say, like, don't have a good enough grasp of like what libghosty is or what it accomplishes or really how it accomplishes it. And so there's just like opinion, like an opinion being thrown out there. But I think that the problem too is that like it's an opinion, but there's a lot of people that try to make their opinions into facts. And it's like your opinion's not a fact. Like there is no. I think even calling something AI slop in general is always an opinion because there's no factual test for what AI slop is because there's no definition for what AI slop is, nor is there a definition for what vibe coded…
I mean, I think there's also the I believe your PR is human slop from 10 years ago. Human slop was absolutely a thing too. I took this thing off one of these programming help sites, Stack Overflow. And then I tried to mash it into what we were doing. There was this config change from this messaging…
Oh, God, no.
Well, do you have a guess?