Ollama's format parameter turns a formatting request into a decoder
constraint, and NOMAD's three ancillary calls — chat title, suggestion
chips, RAG query rewrite — were the ones paying for not having it.
The rewrite is particularly important: whatever it returned got embedded
and sent to Qdrant, so a malformed response degraded retrieval for the
rest of the conversation.
Three explicit design choices made:
- Native-only. The compat path sends nothing new and keeps its string
parsing, so a non-Ollama backend that rejects response_format can't
take out title generation entirely.
- parseStructured returning null is the control flow. It's how each
caller falls back to the parser it already had, which is why it's written
to be total and never throw.
- {queries: []} not {query: ""} for the rewrite (tee-ing up future
improvements)
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