If you've left DEV·TV running on autopilot, you've probably sat through a commercial break. Static, then a full-screen ad for something that doesn't exist: Off-By-One Pizza (order 10 slices, get 9, or 11), Rollback Airlines, Semicolon Insurance, node_modules Self Storage.
Those were always a joke. A retro TV should have ad breaks, and developers should be the ones laughing at them.
As of today, some of those breaks are real.
What changed
DEV·TV already ran two house ads between the joke ones: one inviting you to submit your project to the Spotlight channel, and one asking for a GitHub star. Unlike the fake ads, their buttons actually do something.
Now there's a third, and it's the first real product ad on DEV·TV.
Leading with leantext
The first real ad is for leantext, an open-source tool I just made public.
The idea is simple: web pages, PDFs, screenshots and Office files get turned into lean Markdown before your coding agent reads them. When a conversion looks wrong, the agent gets the original instead.
Why bother? A lot of what agents read is bloated: navigation, scripts, layout, pixels. On real pages leantext cuts tokens by up to 99% (PyPI's NumPy page drops from 92,348 tokens to 755), and in end-to-end Claude Code runs it still got 21 out of 21 tasks right.
It's Apache-2.0 and free:
👉 github.com/shouvik12/leantext
Your coding agent reads the web. Make it read less.
Why leantext goes first
Every TV network runs promos for its own shows. DEV·TV is no different: the first real ad is for something I built.
I tried to do it honestly, though. The ad says "From the maker of DEV·TV" right in the copy. The "not a real advertisement" disclaimer that sits under the joke ads is hidden on this one, because this one is real. And it rotates with the Spotlight and Star ads, so it never takes time away from the projects featured on the Spotlight channel.
How it shows up
Breaks are rare by design, roughly every five minutes on autopilot, and you can switch them off in settings. They alternate between a joke ad and a house ad, and the house ads take turns. When leantext comes up, you get nine seconds of teal and mustard, and the GET LEANTEXT button opens the repo in a new tab. Flip the channel and the ad goes away, just like real TV.
The whole thing is still one index.html with zero infrastructure. Adding the ad was a four-line change.
What's next
The fake ads are staying. Off-By-One Pizza isn't going anywhere.
But now that the break slot can carry something real, it opens a door. Developer tools in the break, next to Merge Conflict Therapy, feels like the right kind of weird. If you've built something you'd want on air, the Spotlight channel is still free, and you can submit from inside the app.
📺 Tune in: shouvik12.github.io/devtv
And if leantext sounds useful, a ⭐ on the repo helps more than you'd think.
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