From Decrypt · By Jose Antonio Lanz
In brief
A developer used Claude Code to disable 25 Xiaomi packages on his parents' TV, and his open-source cleanyourtv project now lists tested setups for 107 TV models from 37 brands.
The tools use Android's built-in debugging bridge to switch apps off rather than delete them, so a restore script can undo every change.
TV makers earn money from ads and viewing data, a practice Texas challenged in December 2025 lawsuits against Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL.
Smart TV owners are pointing AI agents at their living-room sets and ordering them to rip out the sponsored ads, the tracking software and the sluggish home screens that manufacturers ship by default.
The trend exploded on X over the weekend, and it already has a name: vibe coding your TV.
The most-shared case involved a Xiaomi TV owned by a developer's parents. Gathin T. posted on Saturday that the set showed a sponsored ad before anyone could even reach Netflix, so he gave Claude Code the model number and let it work.
The agent found the TV on his home Wi-Fi, switched off 25 Xiaomi software packages and wrote a brand-new home screen that, as he put it, “looks like an Apple TV now lol.”
Vibe coded my parents' TV this afternoon!
It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix.
Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.
Looks like an Apple TV now lol pic.twitter.com/E5Q4A1b0yI
— Gathin (Ø,G) (@gathint) October 17, 2026
Anyone who bought a TV in the last decade likely lives with the same problem, because many sets run Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR—software that fingerprints whatever is on screen, including cable, consoles and anything plugged into an HDMI port, and reports it back so the maker can sell targeted ads. Texas sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL in December 2025, alleging their TVs can capture a screenshot of your display every 500 milliseconds, or twice a second.
Regulators have chased this since at least 2017, when Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle charges that it collected viewing data from 11 million TVs without consent. It didn't hurt the business much: Walmart bought Vizio for about $2.3 billion in 2024, and its executives singled out the TV maker's profitable, fast-growing ad business as part of the appeal.
In other words, the TV you paid for keeps making money for someone else every time you turn it on.
Vibe coding, which means describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI write and run the code, got its name from OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in 2025. Earlier this month, gamers used Claude-based agents to reverse engineer their games and do all kinds of crazy stuff like stuffing Minecraft into Elden Ring.