How I Vibe Coded My Smart TV—And Claude Killed It

What it claims

This is a first-person Decrypt account of using Claude to install Free My TV on an LG TV. Free My TV is an open-source webOS launcher replacement with 3,300 GitHub stars. The TV had been rooted via Homebrew Channel since 2023. Enabling LG Developer Mode wiped that root, and the launcher installed but cannot replace the home screen without root. The author reports two lasting costs: lost root and a launcher that must be opened by hand.

How it works

The Free My TV readme invites the user to give Claude Code the TV's IP address. Claude Code then installs the tools, builds the app and deploys it. Before running anything, Claude reviewed webos/install.py, which does four things:

1. Uses ssh-keygen to unlock an encrypted key.
2. Connects to LG's developer SSH on port 9922.
3. Copies the .ipk to the TV.
4. Calls the same app install service that LG's own tools use.

The review found no exploit, no eval() and no outbound calls. The built package was 636 KB.

Limits

Developer Mode wipes existing root. Dropbear SSH on port 22 is the known sign of a Homebrew Channel root. Claude saw it in its first network scan but still had the user enable Developer Mode. That toggle re-provisions the /media/developer partition, which is where Homebrew Channel, the ad-free YouTube app and the root persistence hook lived. Anyone with a rooted webOS TV should back up that setup before enabling Developer Mode.

The apps came back, but root did not. Claude reinstalled Homebrew Channel v0.7.3 and YouTube AdFree v0.5.3 from their GitHub releases over dev-mode SSH. It then confirmed both against the TV's app list. Root could not be restored. The TV runs firmware 04.60.90 (webOS 7.6.0-19, built July 2026). The original crashd exploit was patched by LG in April 2024, so the boot-time re-root hook no longer fires. The author names faultmanager as the only remaining candidate and plans to try it manually.

Safeguards blocked the re-root research. The Opus 5.5 safeguards flagged the request to research re-rooting and offered a switch to Opus 4.8. Opus 4.8 got further, then flagged a download of a package named "root". A third model flagged the task as a cybersecurity risk. The author reads the model-switch offer as a sign that older models are less restricted.

No autolaunch without root. Free My TV is a Developer Mode app, not a system launcher. Pressing the Home button returns to LG's default launcher, so the app must be opened manually each time unless root makes it persistent.

The article gives no Free My TV version, no install commands beyond the readme's IP-address flow, and no list of supported webOS versions.