OpenShears
I built an uninstaller because OpenClaw refuses to die
Details
- External ID
- 46884862
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- OpenShears
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 4, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 7
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.38207547169811323
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hey HN, I've been using OpenClaw for a few months as my local LLM gateway. It was genuinely fun — the convenience of routing multiple models through a single endpoint is hard to beat. But along the way, I stumbled upon a few surprises that made me uncomfortable:- Config files scattered in unexpected places (~/.openclaw, ~/.clawdbot, and more) - Background processes that respawn after termination - Logs that quietly accumulate without rotation - Cached data persisting long after I thought I'd removed itNone of this is necessarily malicious, but when I decided to move on, I wanted a clean break — not leftover artifacts haunting my system.So I built OpenShears: a CLI tool that scans, detects, and removes all traces of OpenClaw. It's intentionally aggressive but always asks for confirmation before deleting anything.This is fully open source (MIT). If you've found other hidden files or processes that OpenShears missed, PRs are very welcome. Let's make this the definitive cleanup tool.
Enrichment
- Theme
- AI agent frameworks and developer tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- uninstaller tool
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes OpenShears is a focused cleanup and uninstaller utility that identifies process IDs and deletes known configuration and runtime directories left by OpenClaw.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 102 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #66 of 103 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 92 days after the earliest competitor.
- OpenClaw Carapace · hn · 2026-03-02 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- ClawShell, Process-Level Isolation for OpenClaw Credentials · hn · 2026-02-19 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Hardened OpenClaw on AWS with Terraform · hn · 2026-03-13 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- NanoClaw · hn · 2026-02-01 · 533 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Klaus · hn · 2026-03-11 · 160 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- LogClaw · hn · 2026-03-12 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- OpenBrowserClaw · hn · 2026-02-23 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- ClawDeploy · hn · 2026-02-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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