I was reading Savannah Sullivan’s post on taking your own profile picture for LinkedIn when I thought, “I bet AI can do a great job at this.” And I was right. It just depends on your definition of great.
I took a selfie with my webcam and asked Google’s Nano Banana to replace my background with one from the Pacific Northwest. After all, my basement is boring, and I love living here.
Not bad, right? But I noticed that I looked “pasted” onto the background. I wondered how I could achieve feathering with an AI model. Maybe if I added some hair growth (like a quarter inch) the model would better blend the foreground and background. So I prompted, “Add three weeks of hair growth.”
Now that’s a dude from the Pacific Northwest!
I had a good laugh and sent the picture to my sister. Then I thought about how to refine the prompt. Obviously three weeks of growth is too much hair. Maybe try twelve hours? Six? I wondered how many iterations of prompts I’d need to go through, waiting for an image to pop out, fully formed, from the other end. Three? Four? More?
Finally I asked the obvious question: Is this really something worth spending all this time on?
Last July, METR released a study showing that developers using AI coding assistants felt more productive. They enjoyed using the tools and guessed that they were 20% faster.
But the study showed that the developers were 19% slower at completing the work. That’s a 39 percentage point gap in perceived vs. actual productivity.
Personally, working with AI agents has introduced a joy to software development that I haven’t felt in years. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s hard to imaging these tools going away. The real challenge is learning how to use them well.
So if you find yourself spending hours refining a prompt for a one-off task, stop and consider whether you should put your figurative phone on a bookcase and snap that photo yourself.
And finally, per my sister’s suggestion, here’s the result of sending the last image to Wan 2.5 with the prompt: “Make my hair blow in the wind.” Turn your sound on if you love wildlife.