Artificial intelligence’s newest application involves simplifying your smart TV by removing unnecessary features. A growing number of developers and coders are sharing methods to “vibe-code” your television, allowing users to remove sponsored advertisements, accelerate app loading, customize the home screen, disable tracking functions, and more.
One such initiative, dubbed “dumbtv,” outlines its goal on its GitHub page: “Your TV should deliver what you paid for: your applications, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else. No advertisements from the TV itself, no viewing surveillance, no unrequested updates.”
Another project, “cleanyourtv,” claims to remove pre-installed software from any Android TV or Google TV device wirelessly, and to replace its default launcher with one that resembles Apple TV.
While modifying consumer electronics to gain more system control is not a novel concept, recent advancements in AI technology have significantly broadened access to such endeavors. Specifically for smart TVs, these modifications come at a time when consumers are increasingly annoyed by forced advertisements and devices monitoring their viewing patterns.
Contemporary smart TVs come equipped with Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, which identifies on-screen content using methods like screenshots, audio snippets, or other digital fingerprinting techniques.
Should these “dumb TV” modifications gain traction among everyday users, they could potentially disrupt the smart TV advertising industry, which profits by selling viewing data to advertisers or utilizing it to display personalized ads on their platforms.
As Gathin T., the creator of cleanyourtv, explains, the idea to clean up the smart TV interface originated one afternoon when he grew tired of seeing ads on his parents’ television.
“I had Claude Code optimize it over Wi-Fi and create a simple home screen with only their preferred apps. I shared the prompt on GitHub, tweeted the before-and-after, and within two days, thousands of people replicated this for their own TVs. This included Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV, LG, and even a couple of projectors,” the developer noted on a website for donations, linked from the project’s homepage.
This method does not require gaining root access to the TV, nor does it prevent reverting to the factory default settings if desired.
Meanwhile, the dumbtv solution has undergone comprehensive testing on a Fire TV Edition television and Android/Google TV platforms from brands like Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi, and Shield. To implement this hack, its developer, Muzammil Yasin Sabuwala, recommends directing your chosen AI agent to the dumbtv repository on GitHub.
Sabuwala stated that he was motivated to develop dumbtv due to his frustration with ads and the inability to directly access his desired content. He informed TechCrunch that his solution was developed using a combination of Deepseek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5, and he plans to maintain the GitHub repository, adding support for more AI models over time.
A fair warning: all these solutions are still under development, with various users currently testing them across different TV platforms and offering suggestions for updates and fixes.
However, individuals do not necessarily need to rely on existing GitHub projects to accomplish this.
In a recently viral X post, Ryan Doyle describes how he simply provided Claude Code with his TV’s specifications and asked, “Can you hack this?” He claims the AI agent then guided him through the process, enabling him to remove ads and bloatware from his TV, enhance its lagging user interface, and personalize his screensaver.
Doyle then demonstrates in a video the improved speed and responsiveness of the new interface after the AI implemented his requested changes.
Observing posts about people “vibe-coding their TVs” motivated another X user, Mihir Gupta, to attempt it himself.
“One afternoon with Claude Code: 25 unnecessary apps disabled, the 192 MB standard launcher replaced with a customized 83 MB version, plus rotating wallpapers,” he wrote.
However, the outcomes of these hacks can vary. Some users have reported that Claude did not respond to simple requests to “hack my TV,” necessitating more detailed prompts. Others cautioned that AI agents could make errors, potentially disabling crucial components or causing system malfunctions. One individual even claimed they bricked their Android TV using Claude, and another got stuck mid-process while attempting to hack their Fire TV.
For those hesitant to use AI to fully modify their TVs, alternative solutions already exist for customizing Android-based smart TVs, such as home screen replacement applications like ATV Launcher, Projectivity Launcher, and FLauncher.