Owners of Smart TVs Hire an AI Agent to Make Them Less Smart, Report Faster Televisions

For roughly a decade, the television industry’s plan for the living room has been to make the TV smarter. The household’s plan, it turns out, was to make it quieter. This week, TechCrunch reports, a growing number of people have found a tool to do that: a coding agent, a Wi-Fi connection, and an afternoon.

The technology that was supposed to help you find something to watch is now being politely asked to stop finding things for you.

Start with the problem, as TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez frames it. Smart TVs come loaded with sponsored rows, slow launchers, and automatic content recognition, or ACR, which identifies what’s on screen through screenshots, audio clips or digital fingerprinting. The result is a television that is, in effect, watching you watch it, and which then sells the notes. Per the article, widespread adoption of the fixes described below could hurt the smart-TV ad business, which relies on exactly that data.

The origin story is wholesome in the way these things always are. A developer who goes by Gathin T. got tired of the ads on his parents’ Xiaomi TV, which showed a sponsored ad before Netflix. He gave Claude Code the TV’s details, and, per TechCrunch, the agent found the set on his Wi-Fi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages, and wrote a replacement launcher. He posted the prompt on GitHub, calling the project cleanyourtv. He says a few thousand people did the same to their own TVs over the next two days, on Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV and LG sets.

We would like to pause on that last sentence. A man wanted to help his parents watch Netflix. The sponsored ad stood in the way. Within 48 hours, thousands of strangers were conducting minor surgery on their televisions using a chatbot. This is the most efficient parental-tech-support story ever recorded, and the parents may not even know it happened.

The second project, dumbtv, is by Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala. Its stated mission, per TechCrunch, is that the TV should offer “your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else.” That is a lovely sentence. It is also the entire product description of a television from 2004.

Sabuwala says he built dumbtv with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. It has been tested end to end on a Fire TV Edition set and on Android and Google TV models from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi and Nvidia’s Shield. Users point an AI agent at the repository and let it do the setup. It’s FOSS adds a delightful detail: the repo ships with an AGENTS.md, a CLAUDE.md, an llms.txt and a skill file. The project, in other words, includes instructions written for the robot that will be doing the work. The README is addressed to the contractor.

Also per It’s FOSS, dumbtv on Fire OS 7.7.1.7 disables about 65 packages, including Amazon’s ACR screen fingerprinting, the ad ID and analytics, filters telemetry DNS, and replaces the home screen with a 41 KB launcher. The user-reported numbers are a joy to read. One person, Mihir Gupta, swapped a 192 MB stock launcher for a custom 83 MB one in an afternoon, and disabled 25 bloat apps. The TV now does less, and does it faster, which is how every TV should have begun.

Now, the fine print, which is where the accuracy lives.

First, the agent does not simply obey. Per TechCrunch and It’s FOSS, some Claude sessions refused requests phrased as “hack my TV.” Sharing the model number and the package list and asking to remove ads and speed things up worked better. We note this without comment, except to observe that the machine is apparently fine with decluttering your television and merely objects to the word hack. It has the vocabulary of a very careful handyman.

Second, it goes wrong sometimes. TechCrunch says AI agents can make mistakes, such as disabling important packages, and one person reported bricking their Android TV using Claude. Gadget Review notes that these are user reports rather than verified failure rates. It’s FOSS lists the gotchas: disable packages rather than uninstalling them, since uninstalling can break the Home button or HDMI input switching; don’t disable the stock launcher before installing a replacement, or the Home button may send you to a factory test app; and turn off debugging when you’re done so the ADB port isn’t left open on your home network. There is a certain poetry in a project to improve privacy whose first safety tip is close the door you just opened.

Third, it doesn’t work everywhere. Per It’s FOSS, Samsung’s Tizen, LG’s webOS and Roku run on different systems, so the Android TV approach doesn’t apply, and Fire TV needs extra care. TechCrunch’s account of cleanyourtv mentions LG among tested brands; It’s FOSS says the method targets Android and Google TV. The reports differ, and we’d advise anyone with an LG to read the repository rather than this article.

There are also lower-drama options, which the coverage dutifully lists. TechCrunch points to existing home-screen replacements such as ATV Launcher, Projectivy Launcher and FLauncher. Gadget Review suggests checking built-in privacy settings first, noting that Samsung calls its ACR feature Viewing Information Services and LG calls its version Live Plus, and that, per Consumer Reports, switching ACR off doesn’t eliminate all ads. In other words: the sensible path exists, it is free, and several thousand people looked at it and decided to ask a large language model instead.

We respect that. It is the most 2026 sentence available: I could have changed a setting, but I wanted an agent to do it.

The It’s FOSS author cautions against disabling everything, because voice input, screencasting and firmware updates have real uses, and turning off update services means missing fixes. The tradeoff is the entire genre in miniature. You get a faster TV with no ads. You also get a TV nobody is maintaining, configured by a process you supervised for fifteen minutes.

Still, the central irony stands. Companies spent years and large budgets teaching televisions to be clever. The most popular upgrade of the week is teaching them to be stupid, and the tool for that is the cleverest software most owners have ever used.

The TV, for its part, has not commented. It is, by all accounts, much faster now.

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