This paper introduces BRAID (Bounded Reasoning for Autonomous Inference and Decisions), a structured prompting framework that replaces free-form chain-of-thought with bounded, symbolic reasoning encoded as Mermaid flowcharts.

We evaluate BRAID across GSM-Hard, SCALE MultiChallenge, and AdvancedIF.

Key findings:

- Structured symbolic reasoning improves accuracy on complex tasks

- Smaller models often match or outperform larger models using classic prompting

- Significant cost reductions (up to 74× performance-per-dollar)

- Even SOTA models see accuracy gains when pure performance is the goal

All benchmarks and detailed logs are public: https://benchmark.openserv.ai

Happy to discuss methodology, evaluation choices, limitations, or failure cases.