// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
People Are Using AI to Get Rid of Smart TV Ads and Make Their TVs Faster
Last week, we saw a wave of developers determined to reverse engineer everything with AI. This week, there's a new wave, and to be honest, I like this one better.
Some people have found an unusual way of using AI for something that actually matters to them. They are making their smart TVs usable again by stripping the operating system of ads and junk.
If you own a budget Android TV, you know the drill. You switch it on, wait for the home screen to load, scroll past a sponsored banner, and only then reach the app you wanted. People are now asking Claude to fix that for them.
It all started with Ryan Doyle's tweet where he used Claude to clean up his smart TV.
He then followed up with how much faster the TV had become after the cleanup.
Soon, someone else did the same. "Gathin" went a step further and put everything in a GitHub repo called tv-vibehack. It has the prompt, a custom launcher, and a list of gotchas he ran into.
According to the README, it began as an afternoon fixing his parents' Xiaomi Mi TV, which showed them an advert before they could even reach Netflix. The repo is MIT licensed and has crossed 1,300 stars and 146 forks at the time of writing.
There's no magic here. Android TV has the same Android Debug Bridge (ADB) as your Android phone, and Claude simply does the changes for you.
You enable Developer Options on the TV by going to Settings -> Device Preferences -> About and pressing OK on Build seven times. Then you turn on USB debugging (or wireless debugging, if your TV has it). Some TVs,, like Xiaomi, don't show a wireless debugging toggle at all, but USB debugging alone opens network ADB on port 5555.
Next, you run Claude Code or the Claude desktop app on a computer connected to the same Wi-Fi network. You ask it to connect to the TV's IP address and suggest which non-essential apps can go. Some people use Codex or other coding agents too, but the approach is the same.