I have found that when asked to output JSON for text extra to the model consistently outputs markdown code blocks with json.

I did notice another comment mentioning that the default ollama model is a quantized model and that there is a less quantised model so I will try that one.

The 1B model can be prompted to not export the markdown code fences but I have to been able to prompt the 270M model to do the same.

The gemini / gemma models all prefer to do json inside markdown blocks IME. I've adjusted my integrations correspondingly.