Removing TV ads for your parents, 52k stars in 20 days: CleanYourTV sells a story, not a tool

An Indian developer used Claude Code to clear ads off his parents' Xiaomi TV, posted about it, and three weeks later the repo had 52,550 stars and 412 media articles. An ad-free desktop and ADB debloating are both years-old techniques. What's new is handing the work to an AI agent. Below: what it is, where the stars came from, how far the followers have gotten, and how you could still follow.

One afternoon, one TV

Oct 17, 2026: Gathin (@gathint on X, developer relations at 0G Labs, around 10K followers at the time) posted from his parents' house:

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

"Before Netflix even opens, a sponsored ad plays first. I gave the model number to Claude Code. It found the TV on the Wi-Fi, disabled 25 Xiaomi packages, wrote a new desktop, and now it looks like Apple TV." With a before-and-after image and the repo link in the reply.

By 11-06, the post had 8.72M views, 35.9k likes, 32k bookmarks, and 1,695 reposts. Bookmarks are close to likes, which is rare on X: people saved it to come back to later, planning to do the same for their own (or their parents') TV.

What it actually is

One repo: a prompt for AI agents (PROMPT.md) plus several scripts. Connect your computer and the TV to the same Wi-Fi, enable USB debugging on the TV, clone the repo, hand it to Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini CLI, paste the prompt, and enter the TV model. The agent then does three things on its own:

Every step, the agent takes a screenshot of the TV to confirm. It finds which packages to disable on your TV first, and it asks before touching anything you might be using. The README's pitch: "no root, no cable, uninstalls nothing, one-line restore," about 15 minutes.

Free, with only a Buy Me a Coffee link. The first Claude Code link in the README points to the author's employer, "0G Private Computer," with a tracking tag. For the author, the project is personal reputation feeding traffic to the company, not something meant to make money directly.

How the stars came in

Daily GitHub stars: 10-19 1,259 → 10-20 4,091 → 10-21 10,248 → 10-22 17,368 (+7,120 in a single day, the peak) → 10-28 42,550 → 11-06 52,550. Forks: 6,705. Over the last 7 days it gained 7,367; the 7 days before that gained 22,276. It has clearly cooled, but still adds over 600 a day.

Broken down, the source is a chain:

1. The original X post (10-17), mentioned above.
2. Media pickup chain. 10-18 TechPP, Techaeris and India's Navbharat Times wrote first; 10-19 TechCrunch ran "People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again," and Mashable, XDA and It's FOSS followed the same day; 10-20 TechRadar, Tom's Guide, Android Authority, Gizmodo, 404 Media; 10-23 The Verge. The repo's star count climbed steepest from 10-20 to 10-22, which is exactly this wave. There are two angles on the story: "smart TVs getting dumb again" and "vibe coding finally doing something useful." Consumer tech and AI outlets can both run it.
3. Reddit and short-video remixes. r/ClaudeAI, r/tcltvs ("my old TCL was too slow, tried this") and r/singularity all have reposts and hands-on tests. r/vibecoding had someone port it to a Samsung TV. On TikTok, adamstewartmarketing's "I hacked my Samsung TV with Claude Code" got 57k views and dhaibuilds got 24k, both naming CleanYourTV directly.
4. GitHub's own charts. 10-19 to 10-25, it ranked #1 on trendshift's site-wide weekly chart. The author put the badge and a card reading "412 articles, 54 countries" at the very top of the README, so the repo page itself became the landing page.
5. Rename. The first two days it was called tv-vibehack. Around 10-19 it became CleanYourTV, got its own domain cleanyour.tv, and the README was expanded to 11 languages. A name that a journalist or non-developer can say out loud.

Notably, Hacker News did nothing for it: several direct submissions got only 1 to 6 points. The thing that really took off on HN that same week was a manual guide, "An ad-free Android TV" (444 points, 199 comments), which shows the "hate TV ads" sentiment was already there. CleanYourTV is the version the AI crowd picked up.

Someone already built it. Why this one won

By install count it doesn't come close to a fraction of Projectivy. It wins in three ways:

• A story you can get in one image. Everyone has dealt with "setting up my parents' TV" or "watching ads before Netflix." A before-and-after image is enough. It's also a perfect sample of "AI agents can do real work," so people on both sides want to share it.
• It lowers the barrier from "knows ADB" to "can paste a prompt," and uses "disable only, never uninstall, one-click restore" to ease the fear of bricking the TV.
• Users send their data back. Everyone who runs it can submit their TV's "packages to disable" as a PR. So far there are about 2,600 PRs and over a hundred contributors. The README lists 450 models, 122 brands and 31 languages. The broader the coverage, the more it works as an official list, and later builders use that list directly.

The flip side is its real weakness: you need Python, JDK 17–22 and the Android SDK 34. For an ordinary person who has never used Claude Code, that's much harder than going to the store and installing Projectivy. PCWorld, Pocket-lint and PCMag have all published pieces pushing back (PCMag's headline roughly means "no AI needed, just turn it off with the remote"). The author's own README admits this and points people without a coding assistant to a "community app" page.

How far the followers have got

Look-alikes that appeared in the three weeks, grouped by approach:

• Fill the gap it left: an app for people who can't use agents: cleanyourtv-app (Android phones, 1,723 stars), tellyscope (1,626), CleanMyTV (Mac/Windows, 367), TidyTV (on Google Play, 96). The author lists them as official recommendations at cleanyour.tv/app.
• Switch brand or OS: free-my-tv (Google TV / webOS / Tizen, 5,917 stars), dumbtv (Fire TV, 1,966), tv-detox (2,192), tv-home (735).
• Switch language or audience: aerial-tv (a tvOS-style launcher for Chinese-made TVs, built 10-20, about 10k stars), tvhome-zh (a no-build APK), plus localized versions in Russian, Vietnamese and Arabic.
• Name grabbers: cleanyourtv.ai runs a paid companion app with a monthly tier; cleanyourtv.com and clean-your-tv.net were named in the README by the author as "not ours."

What's readable: among the first wave of followers, aerial-tv, which switched audience, got the most, roughly 10k stars within two-plus weeks of being built. Those that built an app to lower the barrier got a thousand or two. Those that moved late mostly stalled at a few hundred (inference: a rough read from build dates and star counts). For TVs specifically, the window has basically closed.

If it were you

Grade B: copying it for TVs is already late. What's worth taking is its format: "hand an AI agent one concrete household device to fix, pair it with a before-and-after image." Applying it to a device nobody has covered yet could reach several thousand stars, but the outcome depends almost entirely on whether the post takes off.

Who it suits: developers with a real household hardware pain point who have fixed it themselves; better if they can tell the story on X or Xiaohongshu and have a few thousand followers; willing to merge PRs and reply to issues every day for the first two weeks.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone wanting to build another TV ad remover (the leader has 52k, and five or six second-tier repos already have several thousand stars); anyone hoping to make money from it (the author only has a donation link, and a paid clone is already competing for the name); people who only write code and won't post. This project's stars came mostly from posts and press, not code (inference: the steepest star days coincide with the press wave).

How to do it:

• Pick a device with many models, where the right action differs per model, and that ordinary people are afraid to touch. Candidates (inference, not checked one by one): routers (disable vendor telemetry, change DNS), car head units, Kindles and e-readers, robot vacuums, printers (bypassing cartridge locks), and smart speakers and fridge screens with ads.
• The deliverable is a PROMPT.md plus a few guarded scripts: back up first, one-click restore, ask before acting, screenshot-confirm each step. CleanYourTV insists the agent must use the repo's scripts and never write its own; backup and restore both live inside those scripts.
• From day one, design the "model list" so users can submit it as a PR when they finish. That's what keeps stars growing afterward.
• Have a path ready for people who can't use agents in the first week (a manual process or an app). Otherwise downstream apps will split that star count.

How to get attention: one post, an emotional hook plus a before-and-after image, with the repo link in the replies. The name should be easy for a journalist to say, paired with its own domain. Once the first article is out, put the badge and press list at the very top of the README. Don't count on HN; it didn't work for this kind of project.

Timing: the "vibe coding fixed XX" angle is still something outlets will write, because CleanYourTV just proved there's a readership for it. Estimate it works until roughly Q1 of year 2027; the more the same format gets used, the harder it becomes to land on TechCrunch.

What would show you read it wrong: ① over the next month or two, look-alikes with the same format (AI agent + some household device) all stall at a few hundred stars, none reaching ten thousand. That would mean CleanYourTV was a one-off, not a format. ② Google or TV makers block pm disable-user in firmware. The TV route would close, and other devices would likely tighten up too. ③ The reverse: someone builds the same format for routers or car head units and it hits ten thousand in a week. Then the format is real, and you should move fast on picking a device.