The latest use case for AI? Dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat. A number of developers and vibe coders have recently been sharing solutions for \u201cvibe-coding\u201d your TV to get rid of sponsored ads, speed up the app launcher, redesign the home screen, disable tracking features, and more.<\/p>\n
One such solution, called \u201cdumbtv,\u201d describes its mission on its GitHub page<\/a> thus: \u201cYour TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else. No ads from the TV itself, no watch tracking, no update you did not ask for.\u201d<\/p>\n Another, \u201ccleanyourtv<\/a>,\u201d promises to strip the bloatware from any Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi, to replace the launcher with one that resembles Apple TV. <\/p>\n While hacking consumer electronics devices to gain more control over their systems is hardly a new idea, the latest advances in AI technology have made such efforts much more accessible to anyone. With smart TVs in particular, the hacks come at a time when people have grown frustrated with being forced to watch ads and put up with their devices surveilling their viewing habits. <\/p>\n Modern smart TVs ship with a technology called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which identifies what\u2019s playing on the screen using screenshots, audio clips or other forms of digital fingerprinting.<\/p>\n If these \u201cdumb TV\u201d hacks become more popular among everyday consumers, they have the potential to disrupt the smart TV ad industry, which profits from selling viewing data to advertisers or using it to display personalized ads on their own interfaces.<\/p>\n As the creator of cleanyourtv, Gathin T., puts it, the idea to clean up the smart TV interface started one afternoon when he got tired of seeing the ads on his parents\u2019 TV set.<\/p>\n Vibe coded my parents’ TV this afternoon!<\/p>\n It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix. <\/p>\n Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.<\/p>\n Looks like an Apple TV now lol pic.twitter.com\/E5Q4A1b0yI<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Gathin (\u00d8,G) (@gathint) October 17, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI had Claude Code clean it up over Wi-Fi and build a simple home screen with just their apps on it. I put the prompt on GitHub, tweeted the before and after,s and a few thousand people did the same to their own TVs over the next two days. Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV, LG, a projector or two,\u201d the developer wrote on a website<\/a> for donations, linked from the project\u2019s homepage<\/a>.<\/p>\n The solution doesn\u2019t require gaining root access to the TV, nor does it make it impossible to return to the factory default state, if desired.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the dumbtv solution has been tested end-to-end on a Fire TV Edition television set and Android\/Google TV platforms on TVs from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi, and Shield. To use this hack, the developer, Muzammil Yasin Sabuwala, suggests<\/a> pointing your preferred AI agent at the dumbtv repository on GitHub.<\/p>\n Sabuwala said he was motivated to work on dumbtv because he was tired of the ads and not being able to delve directly into the content he wanted to watch. His solution was coded using a combination of Deepseek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5, he told TechCrunch, and he plans to maintain the GitHub, adding support for more models over time. <\/p>\n Fair warning: all these solutions are works in progress, and various users are now testing them across different TV platforms and suggesting updates and fixes.<\/p>\n However, individuals don\u2019t need to borrow someone else\u2019s work from GitHub to get the job done. <\/p>\n In one newly viral X post, Ryan Doyle<\/a> explains that he simply sent Claude Code the listing for his TV and asked \u201cCan you hack this?\u201d The agent then talked him through the process, allowing him to remove the ads and bloatware from the TV set, speed up the lagging user interface, and customize his screensaver, he claims.<\/p>\n Doyle then goes on to demonstrate in a video how fast and responsive the new interface is after the AI made the requested changes.<\/p>\n Seeing posts about people \u201cvibe-coding their TVs,\u201d inspired one X user, Mihir Gupta, to try it himself.<\/p>\n \u201cOne afternoon with Claude Code: 25 bloat apps disabled, the 192 MB stock launcher replaced with a custom 83 MB one, plus rotating wallpapers,\u201d he wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n The end result of these hacks may be mixed, however. Some people have found<\/a> that Claude wouldn\u2019t respond<\/a> to their simple suggestions<\/a> to \u201chack my TV,\u201d necessitating more complex prompts. Others warned that AI agents could make mistakes, possibly disabling important packages or breaking things in the process. One person even said they bricked their Android TV using Claude<\/a>, and another got stuck halfway through<\/a> hacking their Fire TV.<\/p>\n For those wary of using AI to fully hack their TVs, there are existing solutions for customizing Android-based smart TVs, such as home screen replacement apps ATV Launcher, Projectivity Launcher, and FLauncher.<\/p>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n