Developers are using AI agents to strip ads and bloatware from smart TVs

A loose wave of developers and "vibe coders" is using AI coding agents to take over smart TVs — stripping out advertising, disabling viewing tracking, replacing sluggish launchers and redesigning home screens. TechCrunch reported on Oct. 19 that what began as scattered experiments has turned into shared tooling that thousands of people have tried on their own sets.

The most visible project is called dumbtv. Its GitHub page states the mission plainly: a TV should do what you paid for — your apps, your HDMI inputs and nothing else, with no ads from the set itself, no watch tracking and no updates you did not ask for. A second project, cleanyourtv, promises to strip bloatware from any Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi and swap the launcher for one that resembles Apple TV.

cleanyourtv's creator, Gathin T., said the idea began one afternoon when he got tired of the ads on his parents' set. He handed the model number to Claude Code; the agent found the television on Wi-Fi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher. After he published the prompt on GitHub and posted before-and-after clips, a few thousand people did the same over the next two days, across Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV, LG and even a projector or two.

What separates this from older TV-hacking guides is the missing technical bar. The solutions do not require root access, and users can return a set to factory defaults if they change their minds. dumbtv's developer says the approach has been tested end-to-end on a Fire TV Edition television and on Android/Google TV hardware from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi and Shield.

The article also documents people improvising. Ryan Doyle said on X that he simply sent Claude Code his TV's product listing and asked whether it could hack the device; the agent walked him through removing ads and bloatware, speeding up a lagging interface and customising the screensaver. Another user, Mihir Gupta, wrote that one afternoon with Claude Code disabled 25 preinstalled apps, replaced a 192 MB stock launcher with an 83 MB custom one and added rotating wallpapers.

The demand behind these experiments is structural. Modern smart TVs ship with Automatic Content Recognition, which identifies what is playing using screenshots, audio clips or other forms of digital fingerprinting. If the de-bloating habit spreads to mainstream consumers, it could chip away at a smart TV advertising business that profits from selling viewing data to advertisers or using it to target ads on the set's own interface.

The risks are as concrete as the appeal. Every one of these projects is a work in progress, with users testing across platforms and filing fixes. Some found that Claude would not respond to a plain request to hack my TV without more elaborate prompts, while others warned that an agent can disable important packages by mistake. One person said they bricked an Android TV with Claude, and another got stuck halfway through a Fire TV.

For people who would rather not hand an agent the keys, Android TV already has established home-screen replacements such as ATV Launcher, Projectivity Launcher and FLauncher. The difference now is that a general-purpose agent can find a set on the network, work out which packages to remove and generate a new interface in a single session — which is exactly the shift the ad business should be watching.