What are the latest use cases for AI? Reduce capacity and eliminate bloat on your smart TV. Lately, many developers and vibe coders have been sharing their solutions to “vibe code” your TV to remove sponsored ads, speed up the app launcher, redesign your home screen, disable tracking features, and more.
One such solution, “dumbtv,” describes its mission on its GitHub page as follows: “The TV should run what you paid for, including apps and HDMI input. There are no ads from the TV itself, no viewing tracking, and no updates you didn’t request.”
Another, “cleanyourtv,” promises to remove bloatware from Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi and replace the launcher with something similar to Apple TV.
Hacking home electronic devices to gain more control over the systems is by no means a new idea, but the latest advances in AI technology have made such efforts much more accessible to everyone. The hack comes at a time when people are becoming increasingly frustrated with being forced to put up with devices that watch ads and monitor their viewing habits, especially on smart TVs.
Modern smart TVs are equipped with a technology called automatic content recognition (ACR) that uses digital fingerprints in the form of screenshots, audio clips, or other forms to identify what’s playing on the screen.
If these “stupid TV” hacks become more popular among consumers, they could disrupt the smart TV advertising industry, which makes money by selling viewing data to advertisers and using it to display personalized ads in its own interfaces.
As Gathin T., creator of cleanyourtv, says, the idea to clean up your smart TV interface started one afternoon when you were tired of watching ads on your parents’ TV.
“We had Claude Code clean it up over Wi-Fi and build us a simple home screen with just the apps on it. We put the prompt on GitHub, tweeted the before and after, and over the next two days thousands of people did the same thing to their TVs: Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV, LG, and a projector or two,” the developers wrote on a donation website linked from the project’s homepage.
This solution does not require you to gain root access to your TV and also eliminates the ability to restore it to factory defaults if necessary.
Meanwhile, the damtv solution has been tested end-to-end on Fire TV Edition TV sets and Android/Google TV platforms on Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi, and Shield TVs. To use this hack, the developer suggests specifying a preferred AI agent in the dumptv repository on GitHub.
Solemn warning: All of these solutions are work in progress, with different users currently testing them on different TV platforms and suggesting updates and fixes.
However, individuals do not need to borrow someone else’s work from GitHub to complete their work.
In a newly viral X post, Ryan Doyle explains that he simply sent Claude Cord a list of his TVs and asked, “Can you hack this?” He then claims that an agent walked him through the process, removing ads and bloatware from his TV, speeding up the lagging user interface, and allowing him to customize his screensaver.
Doyle went on to demonstrate in a video how fast and responsive the new interface was once the AI made the requested changes.
After seeing posts about people “vibrating their TVs”, X user Mihir Gupta was inspired to try it himself.
“One afternoon with Claude Code: 25 bloated apps were disabled, the standard 192 MB launcher was replaced with a custom 83 MB one, and the wallpaper was rotated,” he wrote.
However, the end results of these hacks can vary. Some people found that Claude didn’t respond to a simple suggestion to “hack the TV” and needed a more complex prompt. Some warned that the AI agent could make mistakes and disable important packages or break something in the process. One person even said that they used Claude to brick their Android TV, while another said that they even got stuck while hacking their Fire TV.
For those wary of completely hacking their TV using AI, there are existing solutions for customizing Android-based smart TVs, including home screen replacement apps ATV Launcher, Projectivity Launcher, and FLauncher.
If you make a purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
