What they did
TechCrunch's Sarah Perez collected several people who pointed Claude Code at their own Android or Google TV sets to get rid of sponsored tiles, tracking and slow menus. Gathin T. was annoyed by an ad that played before his parents could reach Netflix. He gave Claude Code the TV's model number, and the agent located the set on the home Wi-Fi, connected to it over the network and disabled the vendor's preinstalled packages, then built a simple launcher holding only the apps his parents use. He published the prompt on GitHub as a project called cleanyourtv. Mihir Gupta and Ryan Doyle did the same with their own sets, Doyle starting from nothing more than the TV's store listing and a request to hack it. No root access was needed and the changes can be undone with a factory reset.
How it went
On the Xiaomi set, 25 packages were removed and the new home screen looks like an Apple TV, Gathin said. He reports that a few thousand people repeated it within two days on Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV and LG sets. Gupta disabled 25 apps and swapped the 192 MB stock launcher for an 83 MB custom one with rotating wallpapers in one afternoon. Doyle says his interface became much faster. Not everyone got there: one person bricked an Android TV and another got stuck partway through a Fire TV.
Worth knowing
The agent can disable packages the TV needs, so have it list what it plans to remove before it removes anything. Some users found Claude declined a bare request to hack a TV and needed a more specific prompt. The account comes from a press write-up quoting posts on X; the numbers are the posters' own.