Claude Code De-Rugs Smart TVs Before Netflix—Ads Out, New Launcher In

Smart TV owners are using AI agents to disable preloaded advertising, tracking software and sluggish default interfaces, a trend spreading over the weekend on X under the name “vibe coding your TV.” In a widely shared example, Gathin T., posting as Gathin (Ø,G) (@gathint), said on Saturday, October 17, 2026, that his parents’ Xiaomi TV displayed a sponsored ad before anyone could reach Netflix. He gave Claude Code the model number, and the agent found the television over home Wi-Fi, switched off 25 Xiaomi software packages and wrote a new launcher that, as he put it, “looks like an Apple TV now lol.”

Many sets run Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, which identifies what appears on screen—including cable, consoles and anything connected through an HDMI port—and can report the data to manufacturers for targeted advertising. Texas sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL in December 2025, alleging their TVs can capture a screenshot of a display every 500 milliseconds, or twice a second.

Regulators have pursued the practice since at least 2017, when Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle charges that it collected viewing data from 11 million TVs without consent. Walmart bought Vizio for about $2.3 billion in 2024, and Walmart executives singled out the TV maker’s profitable, fast-growing ad business as part of the appeal.

Vibe coding, meaning describing a desired result in plain language and letting 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 games and “do all kinds of crazy stuff,” including stuffing Minecraft into Elden Ring. Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding agent, can type and run commands on a computer, enabling it to work with compatible televisions.

On Android-based TVs, the Android Debug Bridge, or ADB, lets a computer on the same network control a set after developer mode is unlocked by clicking the “Build” number seven times in the settings menu. The agent can list installed applications and flag those serving ads or running telemetry—background software that phones home with usage data. Gathin packaged his prompt as cleanyourtv, an open-source project that switches unwanted applications off instead of deleting them, with a single restore script able to put everything back.