The newest use case for AI is making your own television dumb again. For a few days now, developers and vibe coders have been sharing recipes for stripping out sponsored ads, speeding up the app launcher, rebuilding the home screen and switching off tracking. TechCrunch reports on the trend.
Two projects, one prompt
One is called dumbtv, and it states its mission on GitHub like this: “Your 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.” It has been tested end to end on a Fire TV set and on Android and Google TV devices from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi and Shield. Developer Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala suggests simply pointing your preferred AI agent at the repository. He built it with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5.
The other is cleanyourtv, which promises to pull the bloatware off any Android or Google TV over Wi-Fi and swap the launcher for one that resembles Apple TV. Developer Gathin T. describes the trigger plainly: one afternoon he had had enough of the ads on his parents’ set. “I 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, 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.” No root access required, and the factory state stays reachable.
You do not even need somebody else’s repository. In a viral post on X, Ryan Doyle explained that he sent Claude Code the listing for his TV and asked, “Can you hack this?” The agent walked him through it, and afterwards the ads and bloatware were gone, the sluggish interface was faster and the screensaver was his own. Mihir Gupta got into it through posts like that one: “One afternoon with Claude Code: 25 bloat apps disabled, the 192 MB stock launcher replaced with a custom 83 MB one, plus rotating wallpapers.”
Why this lands on TV advertising
Modern smart TVs ship with automatic content recognition. The technology identifies what is on screen using screenshots, audio clips or other digital fingerprinting. That data is exactly what the industry sells to advertisers, or uses for personalized ads on its own interfaces. If these clean-up recipes spread beyond the developer crowd, they hit that business at the root.
Opening up consumer hardware is nothing new. What is new is that nobody needs the skills anymore.
Some people bricked their sets
Results vary. Several report that Claude would not act on a plain “hack my TV” and needed more elaborate prompts; others warn that agents make mistakes and can disable packages that matter. One person bricked their Android TV this way, another is stuck halfway through a Fire TV. If you would rather not risk it, a launcher like ATV Launcher, Projectivy Launcher or FLauncher does part of the job.
What interests me here is less the television than the pattern. Anyone working with Claude Code knows the moment you stop looking for an app that solves a problem and simply describe the problem instead. That moment is now reaching people who are just annoyed by ads in their living room, and that is the real finding. The bricked sets are part of the bill.