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 shared solutions to “vibe-coding” your TV to get rid of sponsored ads, speed up app launchers, redesign the home screen, disable tracking features, and more.
One such solution, called “dumbtv”, describes its mission on its GitHub page as follows: “Your TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else. No ads from the TV itself, no tracking, no updates you didn’t ask for.”
Another, “cleanyourtv,” promises to strip the bloatware from any Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi, replacing the launcher with one that resembles Apple TV.
While hacking consumer electronics devices to gain more control over their systems is hardly a new idea, recent advances in AI technology have made such efforts much more accessible to everyone. Especially with smart TVs, the hacks come at a time when people have grown frustrated with being forced to watch ads and set up devices that monitor their viewing habits.
Modern smart TVs ship with a technology called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which identifies what is playing on the screen using screenshots, audio clips or other forms of digital fingerprints.
If these “dumb TV” hacks become more popular with everyday consumers, they have the potential to disrupt the smart TV ad industry, which profits from selling sales data to advertisers or using it to show personalized ads on their own interfaces.
As the creator of cleanyourtv, Gathin T., tells it, the idea to clean the smart TV interface started one afternoon when he was tired of seeing the ads on his parents’ TV set.
“I had the Claude code clean it over Wi-Fi and build a simple home screen with only their apps on it. I put the prompt on GitHub, the before and after, s twitter and several thousand people did the same with their own TVs in the next two days. Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV, LG, a projector or two”, the developer wrote on a website to link the donations.
The solution does not require root access to the TV, nor does it make it impossible to return to the factory default state if you want.
Meanwhile, the dumbtv solution has been tested end-to-end on a Fire TV Edition TV 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 pointing your preferred AI agent to the dumbtv repository on GitHub.
Sabuwala said he was motivated to work on dumbtv because he was tired of the commercials and not being able to dive straight 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.
Fair warning: all of these solutions are work in progress, and various users are now testing them across various TV platforms and suggesting updates and fixes.
However, individuals do not need to borrow another’s work from GitHub to get the job done.
In a new viral X post, Ryan Doyle explains that he simply sent Claude the code list for his TV and asked “Can you hack this?” The agent then talked him through the process, which would allow him to remove ads and bloatware from the TV set, speed up the lagging user interface, and customize his screensaver, he claims.
Doyle then goes on to demonstrate in a video how fast and responsive the new interface is after the AI has made the requested changes.
Seeing posts about people “vibe-coding their TVs” inspired an X user, Mihir Gupta, to try it himself.
“An afternoon with the Claude code: disabled 25 bloat apps, replaced the 192 MB stock launcher with a custom 83 MB one, plus rotating wallpapers,” he wrote.
The end result of these hacks can be mixed though. Some people have found that Claude does not respond to their simple suggestions to “hack my TV”, which requires more complex requests. Others warned that AI agents could make mistakes, possibly disabling important packages or breaking things in the process. One person even said they hacked their Android TV with Claude, and another stopped halfway through hacking their Fire TV.
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.
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