The latest use case for AI? Dumb your smart TV to get rid of bloat. A number of developers and mood coders have recently shared solutions to “vibe code” your TV to remove sponsored ads, speed up the app launcher, redesign the home screen, disable tracking features, and more.
One such solution, called “dumbtv,” describes its mission this way on its GitHub page: “Your TV should do what you pay for: your apps, your HDMI inputs and nothing else. No advertising from the TV itself, no watch tracking, no updates you didn’t ask for.”
Another, “cleanyourtv”, promises to remove bloatware from any Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi, replacing the launcher with one that looks like Apple TV.
While hacking into consumer electronics devices to better control their systems is not a new idea, the latest advances in AI technology have made these efforts much more accessible to everyone. With smart TVs in particular, the hacks come at a time when people are frustrated with being forced to watch ads and put up with their devices monitoring their viewing habits.
Modern smart TVs feature technology called automatic content recognition (ACR), which identifies what’s playing on the screen using screenshots, audio clips, or other forms of digital fingerprinting.
If these “dumb TV” hacks become more popular with everyday consumers, they could potentially disrupt the smart TV advertising industry, which profits from selling viewing data to advertisers or using it to display personalized ads on their own interfaces.
As cleanyourtv creator Gathin T. says, the idea to clean the smart TV interface was born one afternoon when he was tired of seeing commercials on his parents’ TV.
“I asked Claude Code to clean it up over Wi-Fi and create a simple home screen with just their apps. I put the prompt on GitHub, tweeted the before and after and a few thousand people did the same on their own TVs over the next couple of days. Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV, LG, a projector or two,” the developer wrote on a donation website, linked to the project’s homepage.
The solution does not require gaining root access to the TV nor does it make it impossible to revert to the factory default state, if desired.
In the meantime, the dumbtv solution has been tested end-to-end on a Fire TV Edition TV and on 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 favorite AI agent to the dumbtv repository on GitHub.
Sabuwala said he was motivated to work on dumbtv because he was tired of 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 GitHub, adding support for more models over time.
Warning: All these solutions are under development and various users are currently testing them on different TV platforms and suggesting updates and fixes.
However, individuals don’t need to borrow someone else’s work on GitHub to get the job done.
In a recently viral X-rated post, Ryan Doyle explains that he simply sent Claude Code the listing for his TV and asked “Can you hack this?” The agent then walked him through the process, allowing him to remove ads and bloatware from the TV, speed up the lagging user interface and customize its screen saver, he claims.
Doyle then goes on to demonstrate in a video how fast and responsive the new interface is once the AI makes the requested changes.
Seeing articles about people “vibration coding their TVs” prompted one X user, Mihir Gupta, to try it himself.
“An afternoon with Claude Code: 25 anti-bloat apps disabled, 192MB stock launcher replaced with 83MB custom launcher, plus rotating wallpapers,” he wrote.
The end result of these hacks can be mixed, however. Some people found that Claude didn’t respond to their simple suggestions to “hack my TV,” requiring more complex prompts. Others have warned that AI agents could make mistakes, even disabling important packages or breaking things in the process. One person even reported bricking their Android TV using Claude, and another found themselves stuck halfway through hacking their Fire TV.
For those hesitant to use AI to hack their TV entirely, there are existing solutions for customizing Android-based smart TVs, such as the home screen replacement apps ATV Launcher, Projectivity Launcher, and FLauncher.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
Gn tech
