Published: 2026-10-21
Summary

Let a local Hermes agent change your smart TV: developer mode, the TV's IP address, and a safety prompt with an undo list

Chapters / key moments (click to jump — plays here on the page)

Fahd Mirza uses a free local model to tidy the interface of a ten-year-old LG TV. The video is mostly the preparation: turn on developer mode, note the TV's IP address, connect Hermes to a local model, then paste one long prompt that is the whole project. The prompt's safety rules are the reusable part.

Source video

"Control Any Smart TV with Free Local AI Agent (Hermes + Ollama)" by Fahd Mirza — Watch on YouTube →

Prepare the TV

LG TV: open LG's app store on the TV, search for the Developer Mode app, install it, log in, and switch developer mode on.
Android TV (and other makes he says follow the same path): go to Settings, then About, and click the "Android TV OS build" entry seven times with the remote to enable developer mode. In the same developer settings, switch on USB debugging.
Get the IP address from the TV's network settings. The agent asks for it when you paste the prompt.

Connect Hermes to a local model

He runs a Qwen 3 model through Ollama and points Hermes at it; he does not show the exact fields. The Hermes docs give the route: start Ollama, run hermes model, choose "Custom endpoint (self-hosted / VLLM / etc.)", enter http://localhost:11434/v1, skip the API key and give the model name. Hermes needs at least 64,000 tokens of context and refuses smaller windows, so start Ollama with OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=64000 ollama serve and check the CONTEXT column of ollama ps.

The prompt is the project

The commands and the prompt are in a GitHub repository linked in his description, which we have not read, so none of its commands are reproduced here. What he describes about the prompt:

The agent must ask before every change.
It must switch things off instead of deleting them.
It must keep an undo list so changes can be reverted.
You paste it into Hermes, it asks for the TV's IP, and you can edit the prompt to ask for something else.

If something goes wrong, his fallback is a factory reset of the TV.

Gotchas & Caveats

Developer mode and USB debugging open the TV to commands from your network. Do this only on a network you control, and turn the settings off afterwards.
The video shows the setup but not the agent changing the TV, so we can't say how well a small local model handles it.
Menu names differ between LG, Samsung and Android TV versions; the steps are his, not the makers' documentation.
He sells channel memberships and a newsletter at the end; that is not part of the setup.

Key Takeaways

An agent with device-level access needs three rules in its prompt: ask first, disable instead of delete, and keep an undo list.
Local models in Hermes need 64,000 tokens of context, so set it on the server before connecting.
Keep a recovery path (factory reset) before letting an agent change settings you can't easily reverse.