People Are Vibe Coding the Ads Out of Their Smart TVs: Here's How
Smart TV owners are increasingly using AI agents to disable ads and tracking software on their devices, a trend dubbed 'vibe coding' that has gained popularity on social media.
The trend exploded on social media over the weekend, with smart TV owners using AI agents to remove sponsored ads, tracking software, and sluggish home screens that manufacturers ship by default. The practice has been dubbed 'vibe coding,' a term coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in 2025.
The most-shared case involved a Xiaomi TV owned by developer Gathin T.'s parents. The TV showed sponsored ads before users could reach Netflix, prompting him to use Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent. The AI found the TV on his home Wi-Fi, switched off 25 Xiaomi software packages, and created a new home screen that 'looks like an Apple TV now lol.'
Privacy Concerns
Many smart TVs run Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) software that fingerprints whatever is on screen and reports it back to manufacturers for targeted ads. In December 2025, Texas filed lawsuits against Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL, alleging their TVs can capture screenshots every 500 milliseconds.
Regulators have pursued these practices since at least 2017, when Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle charges that it collected viewing data from 11 million TVs without consent. Despite this, Walmart bought Vizio for $2.3 billion in 2024, with executives highlighting its profitable ad business.
The TV you paid for keeps making money for someone else every time you turn it on.
How It Works
Vibe coding involves describing desired changes in plain language and letting AI write and execute the code. Android-based TVs include the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), a maintenance tool that allows network control once developer mode is enabled. The AI connects through this interface, flags ad-serving or telemetry apps, and disables them.
Gathin packaged his approach as cleanyourtv, an open-source project that switches off unwanted apps rather than deleting them, allowing restoration with a single script. As of Tuesday, it listed tested setups for 107 TV models from 37 brands and had 10,700 GitHub stars.
User Experiences
Users report varying results. Mihir Gupta replaced his TV's 192 MB stock launcher with a custom 83 MB one, while Ansub Khan saw free memory increase by about 90%. Ryan Doyle created a screensaver showing his revenue and Stripe payments. Rod Pers went further, replacing ads with a live 3D model of his apartment.
Claude bricked my tv last month trying to reboot and uninstalled the os, was fun seeing that old android recovery screen on tv
Not all attempts succeed. One user reported bricking his TV, while another got stuck halfway through a Fire TV modification. The cleanyourtv project warns that network ADB is unencrypted on some firmware, potentially allowing any device on the same Wi-Fi to control the TV.
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