Hermes Agent is one of the hottest open-source agents right now. Runs local, reasons well, handles multi-step tasks without hand-holding. But its built-in browser tools have a bottleneck: one tab at a time. Want to search multiple platforms? Your agent queues them up and waits through each one sequentially.
I integrated Actionbook with Hermes and asked it to fetch today's trending topics from Twitter, Reddit, Google, and Hacker News. It spun up four browser tabs in parallel and returned the aggregated results in under a minute.
One instruction. Four platforms. All at once.
Integrate Actionbook with Hermes
One line to get Actionbook running in Hermes:
npx skills add actionbook/actionbook && hermes skills install skills-sh/actionbook/actionbook/actionbook -y
Done.
What I told Hermes
Use Actionbook to operate the browser with chrome remote debugging, launching parallel tasks across the following platforms simultaneously to research [your topic], then synthesize a consolidated trend report.
## Tab Management Rule (Apply to ALL tasks)
> After extracting the required information from any detail page (post, article, thread, comment page), immediately close that tab before opening the next one. Never accumulate more than 1–2 open tabs per platform task at any time.
## Execution
Run all 4 platforms in parallel via Actionbook. Each browser task is independent.
HackerNews
1. Open HackerNews and search for [your topic], filter by this week sorted by popularity.
2. For each high-scored post: open the detail/comments page → extract supporting and opposing viewpoints → close the tab.
Reddit
1. Open Reddit and search for [your topic], filter by Top this week.
2. For each relevant post: open the post → switch comment sorting to Controversial → extract pain points, product comparisons, and real user experiences → close the tab.
Twitter/X
1. Open Twitter/X and search for [your topic], filter for high-engagement original posts (no retweets).
2. For each post: open the reply thread → capture sentiment and key opinions from notable voices → close the tab.
Google
1. Open Google and search for [your topic].
2. For each result (news, blog, announcement): open the page → collect key information → close the tab.
3. Cover 1~2 results.
Hermes reads the instruction, builds the URL list, opens all 4 tabs through actionbook, then snapshots and extracts text from each one in parallel. No waiting for one to finish before starting the next.
You just watch four tabs light up.
Why trending data breaks with one tab at a time
Trending content shifts by the minute. If your agent checks Twitter first, then Reddit, then Google, then HN, by the time it finishes the fourth search, the first result is already stale. You end up with a patchwork of different moments instead of one coherent snapshot.
Parallel tabs fix this. All four searches happen at the same instant. The data you get back is a synchronized time slice across every platform.
How actionbook handles parallel tabs
Actionbook's daemon manages multiple CDP connections concurrently. Each tab is an independent target. No "active tab" concept, no switching overhead.
Behind the scenes, here's what Hermes runs:
# Open 4 tabs at once
actionbook browser new-tab "https://twitter.com/search?q=AI+agents" --session s1
actionbook browser new-tab "https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=AI+agents" --session s1
actionbook browser new-tab "https://www.google.com/search?q=AI+agents+trending+today" --session s1
actionbook browser new-tab "https://news.ycombinator.com" --session s1
# Wait for all 4 to load, then extract
actionbook browser wait-idle --session s1 --tab t1
actionbook browser text --session s1 --tab t1
actionbook browser wait-idle --session s1 --tab t2
actionbook browser text --session s1 --tab t2
# ... same for t3, t4
Four pages loaded, four pages extracted. Hermes reads all the results and writes a single summary.
What else you can do with parallel tabs
Morning briefing for newsletter writers. A dev I know runs this every morning before coffee. Hermes pulls trending from multiple sources, cross-references the overlapping topics, and outputs a structured briefing. What used to be 30 minutes of tab-switching is now a single instruction the night before.
Competitive monitoring. An indie hacker pointed multiple tabs at competitor blogs and changelogs simultaneously. Every Monday, Hermes opens them all, extracts what shipped that week, and drops a comparison into a markdown file. No RSS, no manual checking.
Multiple tabs, one instruction. This is how agents should be searching the web.
