People Are Vibe Coding the Ads Out of Their Smart TVs: Here’s How

Smart TV owners are pointing AI agents at their living-room sets and ordering them to rip out the sponsored ads, the tracking software and the sluggish home screens that manufacturers ship by default.

The trend exploded on X over the weekend, and it already has a name: vibe coding your TV.

The most-shared case involved a Xiaomi TV owned by a developer’s parents. Gathin T. posted on Saturday that the set showed a sponsored ad before anyone could even reach Netflix, so he gave Claude Code the model number and let it work.

The agent found the TV on his home Wi-Fi, switched off 25 Xiaomi software packages and wrote a brand-new home screen that, as he put it, “looks like an Apple TV now lol.”

Anyone who bought a TV in the last decade likely lives with the same problem, because many sets run Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR—software that fingerprints whatever is on screen, including cable, consoles and anything plugged into an HDMI port, and reports it back so the maker can sell targeted ads. Texas sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL in December 2025, alleging their TVs can capture a screenshot of your display every 500 milliseconds, or twice a second.

Regulators have chased this since at least 2017, when Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle charges that it collected viewing data from 11 million TVs without consent. It didn’t hurt the business much: Walmart bought Vizio for about $2.3 billion in 2024, and its executives singled out the TV maker’s profitable, fast-growing ad business as part of the appeal.

In other words, the TV you paid for keeps making money for someone else every time you turn it on.

Vibe coding, which means describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI write and run the code, got its name from OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in 2025. Earlier this month, gamers used Claude-based agents to reverse engineer their games and do all kinds of crazy stuff like stuffing Minecraft into Elden Ring.

Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding agent, is the key ingredient because it can now type and run commands on your computer. Android-based TVs come with the Android Debug Bridge, or ADB, a maintenance tool that lets a computer on the same network control the set once you unlock developer mode by clicking the “Build” number seven times in the settings menu.

The agent connects through that door, lists every installed app, and flags which ones serve ads or run telemetry, the background software that phones home with usage data.

Gathin packaged his prompt as cleanyourtv, an open-source project that switches unwanted apps off instead of deleting them, so a single restore script puts everything back. It needs no “root,” the risky process of unlocking full administrator control, and as of Tuesday it listed tested setups for 107 TV models from 37 brands and had collected 10,700 stars, GitHub’s version of bookmarks. On his donation page, Gathin wrote that a few thousand people did the same to their own TVs within two days.

Others are doing more than just debloating their TVs.

Mihir Gupta replaced the 192 MB stock launcher, the app that draws your home screen, with a custom 83 MB one, while Ansub Khan said free memory on his parents’ old Android TV rose about 90%. Ryan Doyle simply sent Claude his TV’s product listing, asked if it could hack it, and ended up with a screensaver showing his revenue and new Stripe payments.

Rod Pers went further and swapped the ads for a live 3D model of his apartment, with the lights and ceiling fan switching on in real time. Adrian Friend built a minimal interface in the animation tool Rive, and another user said he cleaned up his grandma’s TV, who is now very happy with it.

A rival project, dumbtv, targets the Amazon Fire TV and disables about 65 packages, including the ACR software, before installing a 41 KB launcher with no internet permission at all. Its pitch is blunt: “your apps, your HDMI inputs, a clock, and nothing else.”

Cleanyourtv only fully works on Android TV and Google TV sets from brands like Sony, TCL, Hisense, Philips and Xiaomi, while Samsung’s Tizen and LG’s webOS are different operating systems and Fire TV only allows the cleanup half.

For LG TVs, users have already made some moves, debloating their TVs, but not overhauling the interface so much like the Android TV users. That said, this is a very big plus for privacy conscious users, considering experts have been able to see how LG can secretly pinpoint its users’ location, collect voice conversations and other data even when their TVs appear to be off.

Not every attempt ended well, either: one user said he bricked his TV—tech slang for turning a device into an expensive paperweight—and another got stuck halfway through a Fire TV job.

The cleanyourtv “readme” file also warns that network ADB is unencrypted and, on some firmware, lets any device on the same Wi-Fi take control of the TV, so users should switch debugging off when they finish. AI agents can be tricked, too: Microsoft found this year that hidden instructions could push Claude Code into exposing credentials, a flaw Anthropic patched in May.

One X user offered a more practical warning: if you clean up your parents’ TV, don’t explain how, because they own a lot of other things with model numbers.

As of Tuesday, the cleanyourtv repository had been copied, or “forked,” 1,200 times and had 85 open pull requests, the proposed changes volunteers submit to an open-source project.