tv-vibehack lets a coding agent debloat any Android TV from one prompt

The home screen of a cheap Android TV usually opens with a sponsored ad in the biggest slot. tv-vibehack, an MIT-licensed repository by GitHub user Gathin23, hands a coding agent one prompt and lets the agent remove the ad on the real device. The project collected 430 stars and 37 forks in its first day.

The README reads: "Hand the prompt to Claude Code or any coding assistant, answer a few questions about which apps you use, and it does the rest on the real TV." The repository contains three parts: a prompt file called PROMPT.md, a small native Android TV launcher written in Java under launcher/, and a tools/ folder with a pure-Python ADB client, a base64 file-push helper, and disable.sh and restore.sh scripts.

What the agent does on the TV

The user turns on USB debugging on the TV, pastes the prompt into Claude Code on a computer on the same Wi-Fi, and answers checklist questions about which streaming apps, which four apps go in the dock, and whether to keep the voice assistant, Chromecast and firmware updates. The agent then connects over ADB on port 5555, saves the full package list, the disabled-package list, the getprop output and all settings to a backup folder, and writes a restore script before changing anything.

The prompt groups installed packages into categories: manufacturer telemetry, content and ad services such as PatchWall and recommendation rows, background services like duplicate share and cast handlers, preloaded apps, and streaming apps. It disables the first categories with pm disable-user --user 0 and never uninstalls system packages. The README says the agent asks the user before touching streaming apps, the voice assistant, Chromecast, Miracast or the update service.

The launcher and the gotchas

The companion launcher, com.gathin.tvhome, is built for sets with about 1 GB of RAM. The README describes a pitch-black background, a dock at the bottom in a rounded band holding four apps, a focused app name in Google's Outfit typeface, frosted pills top right for Inputs, Wi-Fi and Settings, and no blur, no video, no background services. Build and install needs JDK 17 and the Android SDK with platform 34 and build-tools 34.0.0.

The README lists the gotchas the maintainer hit. On recent macOS the Google-signed adb is treated as its own app under Local Network privacy and silently blocks adb connect, so the project includes tools/tv.py as a Python-only replacement. Some TVs including Xiaomi have no "wireless debugging" toggle at all, so USB debugging alone opens network ADB on port 5555. Chained pm commands can silently stop after the first, so the script runs one per shell call. Large adb push operations hang, so the project includes tools/b64push.py to send APKs as base64 chunks with an md5 check.

Supported hardware is Android TV and Google TV: Xiaomi, Redmi, TCL, Hisense, Sony, OnePlus, Realme, Nvidia Shield and most others. Samsung Tizen, LG webOS and Amazon Fire TV are out because they use different operating systems with no ADB launcher replacement path. Everything the agent disables is reversible: packages are disabled, never uninstalled, and the restore script puts the stock launcher back.

The maintainer tagged the project vibehack, and the artefact the user installs is a prompt rather than a binary. The agent writes the code and runs it against the real device, and the user accepts the ADB prompt and answers the checklist.

Source

The repository is at Gathin23/tv-vibehack under the MIT licence.