Vibe Code Ads Right Off of Your TV - DTNS 5377

Tom Merritt (0:09)

This old thing, this is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 20th, 2026 Happy birthday to my brother, Tim. We tell you what you need to know, give you important context, and help each other understand.

Jason Howell (0:19)

Tim, you better be listening today. Just saying.

Today, should you vibe code the ads and bloatware off of your smart TV? We're going to talk about that.

Tom Merritt (0:30)

Maybe, maybe not. I'm Tom Merritt.

Jason Howell (0:33)

I'm Jason Howell.

Tom Merritt (0:34)

Let's start with what you need to know with that big story.

So two open tools posted on GitHub recently have gotten a lot of attention for promising to clean up your smart TV and how they were made. Dumb TV is the name of one of them. It says it will get rid of ads, tracking, and forced updates from the TV's operating system, if you don't want those. It's been tested on the Fire TV and the Android and Google TV platforms. Developer Muzammil Yassin-Sabwala suggests telling an agent to implement the app. He's just like, just tell your agent, put dumb TV on your TV. He used a combination of DeepSeq version 4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 to make it, and he hopes to add support for more models. So it's an example of somebody saying, hey, I've got a problem.

Let me vibe code up a solution to it, and then share it with folks. Clean Your TV promises to remove your bloatware from both Android TV and Google TV devices over Wi-Fi, and then install a launcher that is modeled along the Apple TV design. Its developer, Gavin T, posted on X, 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 Wi-Fi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages, and wrote a new launcher. Looks like an Apple TV now, LOL. So he did even less planning it sounded like. He was just like, hey, can you fix this? And Claude Code was like, yeah, sure, here you go. I found the TV. He posted the prompt on GitHub so that others could tweak it to suit their own devices. His solution does not need root access, does not prevent restoring to factory defaults.

Something that might be helpful if you have a warranty repair. And then Ryan Doyle posted on X that he just asked Claude Code, can you hack this? And posted a listing of his TV model, and it walked him through removing ads and bloatware while also speeding up the user interface. He did not share his particular code with anyone else, but he was mostly saying, like, you can just ask the tool, it'll do it. Now, not everybody has had success with this. Sometimes trying to avoid hacking the TV and requiring complex prompts will show up. Claude will say, like, oh, I'm not supposed to do hacky things. And so you might have to make a more complex prompt to get around Claude's guidelines. More than a few people have bricked their device along the way.

There's all kinds of ways that could have happened. It could be the code. It could be user error. We don't really know. TechCrunch points out there are existing apps already for Android-based smart TVs. If you don't feel comfortable vibe coding, you might not realize that there are home screen replacement apps like ATV Launcher, Projective Launcher, F Launcher.

Jason, I don't know. Sounds like we got another example of people saying, I don't need to find an app. I can just make an app to do the thing I want.

Jason Howell (3:38)

Yeah. And we should invite host of Cordkillers to join us for this segment to talk about it. It's Mr. Tom Merritt. Welcome everybody. Tom Merritt.

Tom Merritt (3:47)

Oh, hi. Thanks for having me, Jason. Yes, I'm Tom Merritt.

Jason Howell (3:50)

I just wanted to bring you in the conversation.

Tom Merritt (3:51)

Co-host of Cordkillers with Brian Brushwood. We talk about this sort of thing all the time. In fact, we'll be talking about it on this week's episode.

Jason Howell (3:57)

I'm sure you will.

Yeah, I mean, when I think about this, it's good to have you, Tom Merritt, have you here.

When I think of this, a couple of things come to mind. First of all, TV interfaces, smart TV interfaces really kind of are a double-edged sword right now. Because I feel like for many years, before we got sick of how bloated they got, it was at least for a while, it was kind of like, well, can my TV actually make the experience better when I'm splintered among 20, 30, 40 different services and my content's everywhere, so that I don't have to go into each one of these, can it bring it into the interface? And so that ended up being kind of like the design and development worked towards that. But these teams always have to keep iterating and adding new things, and then it's all ads, and then there's some sort of sponsor interest in directing you to this Netflix show versus that or sports or whatever. And so now they've kind of gotten to a point to where people are like, I want my TV dumb again, like I don't want it to be smart anymore. So I'm not surprised. This is basically the end-ishification of TV interfaces is where we are right now. And now we've got these systems, these AI systems that whether you know, whether you know what you're doing in code or not, it's very easy to just tell a system like this, hey, this thing's doing this thing. I don't like how it does it. What are my options? And it might give you a great option. And in this case, for a couple of people, I actually like executed them, which is really fascinating.