Telling a research AI agent which method to use is close to telling it nothing at all.

What actually carries performance is the procedure, so write the steps rather than the method name.

ASI-Bench gives agents 60 real research projects across 11 scientific fields. Same goal, same data, same scoring every time. Only the instructions change: full procedure, method name only, or nothing but the objective and the data.

Across 18 agent and model combinations, the average score fell from 50.91 with the full procedure to 29.10 with only the method named.

Dropping the method as well cost another 2.5 points. Nearly all the damage comes from losing the steps.

Method-only prompts were also the most expensive to run, burning 59% more tokens than complete instructions and more than prompts that named no method at all. Naming an approach pins the agent to a direction while still leaving it to rebuild every implementation detail.