Overview
- A developer used Claude Code to disable 25 Xiaomi packages on his parents' TV; his open-source project, cleanyourtv, now lists test configurations for 37 brands and 107 TV models.
- These tools use Android's built-in debugging bridge to disable the apps rather than delete them, allowing all changes to be undone with a restore script.
- TV manufacturers earn money through advertising and viewing data; Texas filed a lawsuit in December 2025 against Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL challenging this practice.
Smart TV users are directing AI agents at their living room TVs, asking them to remove manufacturer-preinstalled sponsored ads, tracking software, and sluggish home screen interfaces.
This trend quickly went viral on X over the weekend and has now been named: vibe coding for TV.
The most notable case came from a Xiaomi TV. Developer Gathin T. posted on Saturday that the TV displayed sponsored ads even before the user opened Netflix, so he provided the model number to Claude Code to handle it automatically.
The agent found this TV on his home Wi-Fi, disabled 25 Xiaomi packages, and created an entirely new home screen interface. As he put it, “Now it looks like an Apple TV, haha.”
This afternoon, I did vibe coding on my parents' TV!
It displays sponsored ads before you enter Netflix.
I gave the model number to Claude Code, which found the TV on Wi-Fi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages, and created a new launcher.
It looks like Apple TV now, haha pic.twitter.com/E5Q4A1b0yI
— Gathin (Ø,G) (@gathint) October 17, 2026
Anyone who bought a TV over the past decade has likely encountered the same issue, as many TVs run Automatic Content Recognition (ACR)—software that takes fingerprints of content on the screen, including cable TV, gaming consoles, and any device connected via an HDMI port, then sends the data back to manufacturers to enable targeted advertising. In December 2025, Texas sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL, alleging that these TVs capture screenshots every 500 milliseconds—that is, twice per second.
Regulators have been investigating such practices since at least 2017. That year, Vizio paid a $2.2 million settlement for collecting viewing data from 11 million televisions without consent. However, this did not significantly impact the business: in 2024, Walmart acquired Vizio for approximately $2.3 billion, with its executives citing Vizio’s lucrative and rapidly growing advertising business as a key attraction of the acquisition.
In other words, every time you turn on the TV you purchase, it continues to generate income for someone else.
Vibe coding refers to describing what you want in natural language, then letting AI write and run the code. The term was coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in 2025. Earlier this month, gamers used Claude-based agents to reverse-engineer games and perform wild antics, such as embedding Minecraft inside Elden Ring.
Anthropic’s coding agent, Claude Code, is a crucial tool because it can now input and execute commands directly on your computer. Android-based TVs come with the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), a maintenance tool; once you enable Developer Mode by tapping the “Build” number seven times in the settings menu, a computer on the same network can control the TV.
The agent connects through this entry point to list all installed applications and identify which ones are responsible for serving ads and which are running telemetry functions—software that sends usage data back to the vendor’s backend.
Gathin organized his prompts into a project called cleanyourtv, an open-source tool that doesn't delete unwanted apps but instead turns them off—allowing users to restore everything with a single recovery script. It doesn’t require “root” access, a high-risk operation that grants full administrative control. As of Tuesday, the project listed test configurations for 37 brands and 107 TV models and had gathered 10,700 stars, equivalent to bookmarks on GitHub. Gathin wrote on the donation page that thousands of people had already done the same within just two days.
Some people are doing more than just slimming down TVs.
Mihir Gupta replaced the original 192 MB launcher—the app that renders the home screen—with a custom 83 MB version; Ansub Khan said his parents’ old Android TV gained about 90% more available memory. Ryan Doyle simply sent the TV’s product page to Claude and asked if it could be “hacked,” receiving in return a screensaver displaying his income and new Stripe payments.
I saw everyone doing vibe coding on their TVs, so I tried it too—my TV had become unbearably slow.
Spent an afternoon with Claude Code: disabled 25 bloated apps, replaced the original 192 MB launcher with a custom 83 MB version, and added a carousel wallpaper.
With AI, you just need to imagine! pic.twitter.com/QR6V3Au2f5
— Mihir Gupta (@0900mihir) October 18, 2026
Rod Pers took it a step further by replacing the ad with a real-time 3D model of his apartment, where the lights and ceiling fan turn on and off in real time. Adrian Friend created a minimalist interface using the animation tool Rive, and another user shared that he helped his grandmother clean her TV, leaving her very satisfied.
Joined the entire TV "hacking" trend
Made a super minimalist version with @rive_app—why not? pic.twitter.com/rk53DOBfhB
— Adrian Friend (@z00med0ut) October 19, 2026
Another competing project, DumbTV, primarily targets Amazon Fire TV by disabling around 65 packages, including ACR software, and installing a launcher that is only 41 KB in size with no internet permissions whatsoever. Its tagline is straightforward: “Your apps, your HDMI inputs, a clock—that’s it.”
CleanYourTV is fully available only on Android TV and Google TV devices from brands such as Sony, TCL, Hisense, Philips, and Xiaomi; Samsung's Tizen and LG's webOS are different operating systems, and Fire TV supports only partial cleaning functions.
For LG TVs, users have performed some actions to remove bloatware, but have not completely overhauled the interface as Android TV users have. Nevertheless, this remains a significant advantage for privacy-conscious users, as experts have demonstrated that LG can secretly track user locations and collect voice conversations and other data even when the TV appears to be turned off.
LG spyware has been removed, and the interface has been simplified. https://t.co/Ams81w9uKE pic.twitter.com/qmLGDURELb
— malone (@malonehedges) October 20, 2026
Not every attempt went smoothly: some users said they “bricked” their TV—a tech slang term for rendering a device as useful as an expensive paperweight—and others got stuck halfway through the Fire TV process.
Last month, while trying to reboot, I bricked my TV and uninstalled the system; it was kind of interesting to see the old Android recovery interface appear on the TV.
— ? (@jihadsinwar) October 19, 2026
The "readme" file for cleanyourtv also warns that network ADB is unencrypted, and on certain firmwares, any device connected to the same Wi-Fi as the TV could take control of it; therefore, users should disable debugging after completing their tasks. The AI agent itself could also be tricked: this year, Microsoft discovered that hidden instructions could cause Claude Code to expose credentials, and Anthropic patched this vulnerability in May.
An X user offered a more practical reminder: If you help your parents clean up their TV, don’t tell them how to do it—they still have plenty of other items with model numbers at home.
As of Tuesday, the cleanyourtv repository has been forked 1,200 times and has 85 open pull requests—proposed changes submitted by volunteers to the open-source project.
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