A few thousand people tried a single AI prompt for cleaning up their televisions within two days of it being posted, according to TechCrunch. The report, by Sarah Perez on Oct. 19, describes owners of Fire TV, Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi and LG sets pointing coding agents such as Claude Code at their own TVs to remove ads, bloatware and viewing trackers. It is built on user posts, not on any measurement of how widespread the practice is.
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Smart TVs use automatic content recognition, a system that identifies what is on screen, and the owners TechCrunch quotes treat that as one of the things to get rid of. The accounts below come from named developers posting about their own sets. None of it has been independently tested here, and the descriptions stay at the level of what people said they did.
Four named people and the tools behind the posts
In TechCrunch’s report, Perez frames the movement as developers and “vibe coders” aiming agents at a familiar annoyance: television home screens that sell advertising, run bundled apps nobody asked for and log viewing habits. The article is a roundup of public posts rather than a survey, so the names below are the people who chose to post, and the sample is self-selected. TechCrunch names four people. Gathin T., who posts as @gathint, created a tool called cleanyourtv after he saw ads on his parents’ television, and published it in an Oct. 17 post on X. Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala, @DevMuzzammil, built dumbtv because, per the report, he was tired of ads and of being unable to reach content directly, and announced it on Oct. 18.
The other two are individual users. Ryan Doyle, @doooyle, said he put a one-line challenge to Claude Code, asking whether it could hack the set, and that the agent removed ads and bloatware and sped up the interface. Mihir Gupta, @0900mihir, disabled 25 bloat apps and, according to TechCrunch, swapped a 192 MB stock launcher for a custom 83 MB one with rotating wallpapers.
The agents vary by project. Per TechCrunch, the cleanyourtv repository is meant to be run with Claude Code, while dumbtv lists DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 among the models used, and can be handed to a generic AI agent. The report adds that Claude sometimes declined a plain “hack my TV” request, so some users wrote longer, more detailed prompts to get it to proceed. That friction matters, because it means results depend on how a person words the request, and on the model that happens to answer, as much as on the television. The report does not say how the dumbtv or cleanyourtv prompts were tuned.
What is being changed on the TVs
As TechCrunch describes it, the changes fall into three groups: removing preinstalled apps, replacing the home-screen launcher, and switching off tracking. The cleanyourtv project connects to a set over Wi-Fi, strips 25 Xiaomi packages and installs a launcher that Gathin joked “looks like an Apple TV now lol.” The report says it needs no root access and that a factory reset restores the original state. Doyle, for his part, also customized his screensaver, which suggests the appeal is as much personalization as ad removal. Gathin’s own motive, as the report relays it, was simpler: family members were watching a television that kept pushing ads at them.
Sabuwala’s dumbtv sets a broader goal: no TV-level ads, no watch tracking and no unrequested updates. TechCrunch says it was tested end to end on a Fire TV Edition set and on Android and Google TV models from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense and Xiaomi, plus a Shield. The project describes its mission as a television that does only what the buyer paid for: the buyer’s apps, the buyer’s HDMI inputs, and nothing else.
The report does not say how any of this is done at the system level. It does not mention ADB, DNS blocking or the specific mechanism by which tracking is switched off, and this article does not fill that gap. Readers looking for the mechanics would need the projects’ own documentation, and the people behind them describe the tools as works in progress.
Bricked sets and the limits of the reporting
The risk is real in the accounts TechCrunch gathered. One person said they bricked an Android TV while using Claude, and another got stuck partway through hacking a Fire TV. Some users warned that an agent could disable a package the set needs and break it. The report quotes no manufacturer, and it contains no warranty statements, so whether any of these edits affects coverage is not addressed.
The adoption figure also needs care. “A few thousand people” applied one tool’s prompt over two days, per TechCrunch, which measures interest in a single viral post and says nothing about success rates, how many sets ended up damaged, or how many owners kept the changes. Almost everything in the report comes from the builders themselves and from enthusiastic early users, a group more likely to post wins than failures.
TechCrunch also notes a quieter option that involves no AI at all: existing replacement launchers such as ATV Launcher, Projectivy Launcher and FLauncher, which change the home screen without an agent rewriting anything. The posts it collects describe a practice that is early, informal and unaudited, and its clearest warning is a user’s own account that at least one television stopped working.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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