Smart TV owners tired of ads, tracking, and sluggish interfaces are turning to AI agents to strip away bloatware and regain control of their devices. According to TechCrunch, developers and "vibe coders" have recently shared solutions for using AI to remove sponsored ads, disable automatic content recognition (ACR) tracking, speed up app launchers, and redesign home screens.
The trend comes as frustration grows over smart TVs that force ads and surveil viewing habits. Tools like "dumbtv" and "cleanyourtv" aim to make TVs behave like simple displays again, showing only apps and HDMI inputs.
AI Agents That Strip Ads and Tracking
One solution, called "dumbtv," describes its mission on GitHub: "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." Another, "cleanyourtv," promises to remove bloatware from any Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi.
The creator of cleanyourtv, Gathin T., told TechCrunch he got the idea after seeing ads on his parents' TV. He used Claude Code to clean it up: "Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher. Looks like an Apple TV now lol." He then shared the prompt on GitHub, and a few thousand people replicated the hack on their own TVs in two days.
How the TV Hacks Work: No Root, Possible Return
These solutions don't require root access to the TV, nor do they make it impossible to return to factory settings. The dumbtv solution has been tested on Fire TV Edition televisions and Android/Google TV platforms from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi, and Shield.
To use the hack, developer Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala suggests pointing your preferred AI agent at the dumbtv repository on GitHub. He coded the solution using Deepseek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5, and plans to maintain the project.
