Show HN: OpenShears – I built an uninstaller because OpenClaw refuses to die
haebom Wednesday, February 04, 2026
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 it
None 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.