Developers and hobbyists have been sharing ways to use AI coding agents to remove sponsored ads, speed up app launchers, redesign home screens and disable tracking features on smart TVs.
One project, called 'dumbtv,' states on its GitHub page that a TV should provide 'your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else,' without ads from the TV itself, watch tracking or unrequested updates. The dumbtv solution has been tested end-to-end on a Fire TV Edition television and on Android/Google TV platforms from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi and Shield.
Another project, 'cleanyourtv,' promises to strip bloatware from any Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi and replace the launcher with one resembling Apple TV. Its creator, Gathin T., wrote that the idea began when he grew tired of ads on his parents' TV set, and that a few thousand people tried the same approach over two days.
The solutions do not require root access and do not make it impossible to return to factory default settings, according to the report. Some users have described asking Claude Code to hack their TVs directly, with one X user, Mihir Gupta, writing that 25 bloat apps were disabled and a 192 MB stock launcher was replaced with an 83 MB custom one.
Results may be mixed. Some people found Claude would not respond to simple requests to 'hack my TV,' while others warned that AI agents could make mistakes, possibly disabling important packages. One person said they bricked their Android TV using Claude, and another got stuck halfway through hacking a Fire TV. The report notes that all these solutions are works in progress.