Vibe coders use Claude Code to strip ads from smart TVs

'Can you hack this?' Ryan Doyle asked Claude Code, after pasting in nothing but the listing for his TV. According to TechCrunch's Sarah Perez, the agent walked him through removing the ads and bloatware from the set itself.

Two GitHub projects anchor the trend. CleanYourTV, from a developer called Gathin T., strips bloatware from Android TV and Google TV over Wi-Fi and installs a launcher that resembles Apple TV. One run uninstalled 25 Xiaomi packages and swapped in the new launcher. DumbTV, from Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala, was built using DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5, and tested on Fire TV Edition, Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi, and Shield. Its pitch is flat: 'Your TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else.'

Mihir Gupta posted a tally: 'One afternoon with Claude Code: 25 bloat apps disabled, the 192 MB stock launcher replaced with a custom 83 MB one, plus rotating wallpapers.'

Results are uneven. Several users reported bricked sets or installations that stopped halfway, and the agents sometimes disable packages the TV needs. The business the scripts chip at is the automatic content recognition pipeline that smart-TV makers sell against.