What is `tic` and what can I do about it using 100% CPU? I have a process named tic that occasionally shows its ugly face in htop or Activity Monitor, consuming around 100% CPU.  I couldn't find any good info on it last time I tried.  What is it for, what would make it suck up my processor cycles, and what can be done about it. 

I'm on the latest sub-version of Mojave: 10.14.3 (18D42).

Update: this happened again, and about 80% of the lines displayed by sudo lsof -p PID were related in some way to Visual Studio Code.  I don't know if that's a useful clue for anyone about the cause... but I'll put it out there...
man tic says:  


  tic - the terminfo entry-description compiler


You can use it to enable features in you terminal (like italics) that Apple didn't include in the terminfo database.
See: How to show italic in vim in iTerm2

tic is a one-shot program and should not run in the background.
Open Activity Monitor, select tic &amp; do ⌘-I, the first line  says Parent proces: followed by a (blue) name which is a link. This tells you what launched tic, you can click that link to dive deeper in the launchers (Parent Proces)  until you end up on kernel_task.

If the Parent process says launchd you may have an entry in either 


/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchDaemons
~/Library/LaunchAgents/


Here there live .plist files which control the running of background processes.

You can use LaunchControl to see all such daemons or agents.