I had never fine-tuned an LLM before, so when the Gemma 3 270M model was released with claims that fine-tuning unlocks its true potential, I decided to follow a tutorial to see what the process actually involves. I wanted to understand the effort required to fine-tune a model and build both a frontend and backend around it. I used the example from Google's business-email-assistant tutorial and had Claude Opus 4.1 in Zed editor handle the rest of the implementation.
This is the outcome.