You know, I gave it one more shot. I did something mildly, possibly illegal.
I took a DirecTV APK, made it debuggable, threw a proxy in between it, and captured the HTTPS traffic going through it to see what flags it was sending, and found a pretty big hole in my logic and in possibly the fast channels logic in general for DirecTV. I needed to take a break for a few hours and clear my head, but boy is reverse engineering fun!
I was not sending the correct user agent in my overlay, which was causing it to not target the ads correctly and just make things super-duper weird, even though they were slightly better. And I seemingly corrected that. So per device, you'll get the correct user agent for that device. And it seems like something has clicked. And I'm getting ads that I've either never seen before or are what I would get on a properly configured Osprey box.
So, if this holds up and my AI repair is seamless, I see no reason to just not leave this as a set and forget.
Actually, Claude Haiku 5.5 came out this past week, and it's very cheap to run. I have a GitHub CI set up using this tool called Aider And it's configured to basically handle any drift between Kinetic Man's code and my hooks, which are very minimal. But if something moves or a function is renamed, it should be able to handle basic changes like that.
I also decompiled a DirecTV app from 2023 and confirmed that basically everything has stayed the same. Nothing has changed. Their upstream code on their end, the flags they're expecting, it's all the same three years out. So that stuff should be fairly static. Very little chance of breakage there. What will break, probably, is as Kinetic Man refactors. So that's what the AI Auto Repair is for. And I also set up another little thing. I run an Always On Agent called Hermes that is hooked into my Claude subscription. And that is designed to handle larger edits with Opus 5.5 when the standard AI repair fails in an automated fashion, which is pretty darn cool. It just monitors for failures.
So I'm going to watch a little bit more, but if this is settled and working, I see no reason to give up the nice things about channels like ComSkip. Especially if it's just set and forget and it works, I would be very happy for that.