Point Claude at your TV and it deletes the ads

Developers and vibe coders have started pointing AI coding agents at their smart TVs to strip out sponsored ads, bloatware and tracking, and to replace the home screen with something closer to a dumb TV. One project, dumbtv, states the goal plainly: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else — no ads from the TV itself, no watch tracking, no update you did not ask for.

Another, cleanyourtv, works over Wi-Fi on Android TV and Google TV without root access and can be reverted to factory defaults. Its creator gave Claude Code his parents' TV model number; it found the TV on the network, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher. A few thousand people reportedly did the same within two days, across Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV and LG sets.

The target underneath the clutter is automatic content recognition, the fingerprinting system TVs use to identify what is on screen and feed viewing data to advertisers. The results are not uniformly safe: one user bricked their Android TV using Claude, and another got stuck halfway through a Fire TV hack.