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Creative Hardware

People Are Turning Their Smart TVs Dumb Again, and AI Is Doing the Work

A 13-day-old GitHub project has over 46,000 stars for one job: stripping ads and tracking off Android and Google TVs using an AI coding assistant as the installer. It isn't firmware in the traditional sense — but it's the same instinct that built the FM-1 scene, aimed at a different box.

5 min read

Parts I and II of this series have been about firmware in the strict sense: code that gets compiled and flashed onto a device, replacing what the manufacturer shipped. This one is a cousin, not a sibling — same instinct, different mechanism, and worth being precise about the difference up front.

Nobody is flashing a new operating system onto a Samsung or TCL TV here. What’s actually happening is lighter and, in a way, stranger: people are opening an AI coding assistant, pointing it at their own television over a USB debugging cable, and asking it to quietly turn off the parts of the software that show ads and report what they watch.

The project that made this a trend

The one driving the numbers is called CleanYourTV, a GitHub repository published by a developer going by Gathin23 on 17 October 2026. As of today it has 46,214 stars and 5,688 forks, built almost entirely in thirteen days. TechCrunch covered the broader movement on 19 October, two days after the repository appeared — which tells you how fast this one moved from side project to story.

The repository doesn’t contain a program you run. It contains a prompt. You clone it, open the folder in an AI coding assistant, and the instructions ask the assistant to connect to your TV over ADB (Android Debug Bridge — the same developer tool phone and TV manufacturers use themselves), read the list of installed packages, and disable — not delete — the ones on a maintained list of ad servers, telemetry services and bundled apps nobody asked for. In their place, it sets up a clean, Apple TV-style home screen. Everything it does is logged, and the project’s pitch is that every change can be undone the same way it was made.

As of this writing, the repository still carries no licence file — NOASSERTION is GitHub’s label for that, same as several of the FM-1 scene’s own most-used repositories we found when we started this series.

It is not alone

CleanYourTV’s success pulled a wave of near-identical projects behind it, aimed at the same TVs with the same pitch and, in several cases, built by people who say outright that they wrote them with an AI coding assistant in an afternoon:

  • dumbtv, by humblemuzzu — 1,778 stars, extends the same idea to Fire TV, ships its own open-source launcher, no licence file.
  • cleanmytv, by wingedpanther — 171 stars, a downloadable Mac/Windows app version of the same workflow, MIT licensed.
  • TVSlim, by jolabs40 — a Windows GUI tool naming specific supported sets (TCL, Philips, Nvidia Shield, Xiaomi), Apache-2.0.
  • cleantv, by JohnWayneeee — built as a packaged skill for Claude Code specifically, MIT licensed, adds picture/sound calibration on top of the ad removal.

None of these are forks of CleanYourTV in the GitHub sense. They’re independent restatements of the same prompt-and-ADB idea, which is itself telling: the barrier here was never technical skill, it was knowing the trick existed.

Where this really does rhyme with firmware communities

Three things line up almost exactly with what we found in the FM-1 scene and the router and MP3-player communities before it.

An update channel is the opening. ADB exists on every Android-based TV because manufacturers need a way to push updates and because developers need it to test apps. It is the exact same “loaded gun pointed at your own product strategy” we described for the FM-1’s Bluetooth chip — a feature that exists to fix bugs and works just as well for code the manufacturer didn’t write.

AI lowered the time cost, not the access. The access — ADB, root-equivalent package control — has existed for years. What changed is that reading a system’s installed-package list and matching it against a known-bad list used to require someone who understood Android’s package manager. Now it requires someone who can paste a prompt. We’ve written about the same shift showing up in audio plugins and in game decompilation — this is the third place we’ve found it this month alone.

The undo story matters, and it’s genuinely weaker here. The FM-1 scene has a bootloader that never gets touched. Erica Synths’ LXR releases have the same guarantee, in writing, in their READMEs. CleanYourTV’s answer is a log file and the promise that a disabled package can be re-enabled — true for the ad-blocking part, but several of the debloat lists these projects ship also turn off the manufacturer’s own update service, which is not something an undo script restores for free. TechCrunch’s reporting includes people who got a TV stuck mid-process or bricked an Android TV outright trying this. That is a real difference from a vendor-shipped restore button, and it’s the honest reason to be more careful here than with a manufacturer-sanctioned firmware release.

The part worth sitting with

Every manufacturer in this series eventually faces the same choice we described after the FM-1’s restore button and Elektron’s forum ban: police the community, or give it a sanctioned way to do what it’s already going to do anyway. Samsung, LG, Google and the TV brands running Android TV or Google TV haven’t had to answer that question yet, because nobody has pushed it onto their desk the way Music Tribe and Erica Synths pushed it onto their own. CleanYourTV’s growth curve suggests that desk is getting more crowded by the week.

Sources

The firmware-communities series

AI as the accelerant, elsewhere

The right-to-repair thread

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