Devs use Claude Code, DeepSeek to strip ads from smart TVs

A developer typed a TV model number into Claude Code. The agent found the set on his Wi-Fi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages, and wrote a new launcher.

That is the pitch for cleanyourtv, one of two GitHub projects TechCrunch reports consumers are using to strip ads, trackers, and bloatware from smart televisions. The other is dumbtv, built by Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala using DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5, and tested end-to-end on a Fire TV Edition set and on Android/Google TV hardware from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi, and Shield.

The dumbtv README states the goal plainly: "Your TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else. No ads from the TV itself, no watch tracking, no update you did not ask for."

Users have taken to social media to show results. Ryan Doyle sent Claude Code his TV listing and asked "Can you hack this?" The agent walked him through removing ads, speeding up the interface, and swapping the screensaver. Mihir Gupta reported: "One afternoon with Claude Code: 25 bloat apps disabled, the 192 MB stock launcher replaced with a custom 83 MB one, plus rotating wallpapers."

The target is automatic content recognition, which the article says "identifies what's playing on the screen using screenshots, audio clips, or other forms of digital fingerprinting." The dumbtv recipe does not require gaining root access and does not block a return to factory default.

Not everyone has had a clean run. TechCrunch notes one user bricked an Android TV with Claude, another got stuck halfway through hacking a Fire TV, and some found Claude would refuse a bare "hack my TV" request. The scene fits a wider stretch of coverage: we've tracked 123 Coding Tools stories in the last 90 days, and consumer agent use is bleeding into hardware the vendor never meant to be a software project.