Smart TVs have turned into billboards, and owners are cleaning them out with AI: the ads disappear, but sometimes so does the TV

You buy a TV, plug it in, and instead of your apps you're greeted by sponsored ads, recommendations you never asked for and a sluggish home screen. More and more programmers and hobbyists - so-called "vibe coders", who program with the help of artificial intelligence - have decided not to put up with it and are using AI agents to scrub their smart TVs of ads, tracking and preinstalled apps.

The dumbtv project by Muzammil Yasin Sabuwala has a simple goal, spelled out on its GitHub page: the TV should show you only your apps and HDMI inputs, and nothing else. Sabuwala says he got fed up with the ads and with not being able to get straight to his content. He tested it on Fire TV and on Android and Google TV devices from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi and Shield, and built it with the help of DeepSeek and Claude models.

The second project, cleanyourtv, was made by Gatin T. after he got sick of the ads on his parents' TV. Over Wi-Fi, the tool deletes preinstalled apps and replaces the home screen with one that looks like Apple TV. Using Claude Code, he removed 25 software packages from a single Xiaomi. According to him, several thousand people did the same in two days, on Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV and LG sets and on projectors. Another user, Mihir Gupta, disabled 25 unnecessary apps and swapped the standard 192 MB home screen for his own 83 MB one.

No root access is needed, and the TV can be restored to factory settings. But it doesn't always go smoothly. Some found that the AI agent won't respond to a simple "hack my TV" and asks for more detailed instructions. Others warn that the agent can also disable a package that matters to the system - one user says that's how he ended up with a dead Android TV, and another got stuck halfway with a Fire TV.

Anyone who wants less risk can reach for ready-made Android TV home screens such as ATV Launcher, Projectivy Launcher or FLauncher. But the point of the whole story is something else: people paid for the device, and now they're spending evenings with AI agents to free it from the manufacturer's software. How many TVs in our living rooms are tracking what we watch without us even knowing?