Too burned out to travel? This new app fakes your summer vacation photos for you

Summary

At a time when startup hustle culture is back, when “locked in” tech founders have even embraced the “996” way of working — 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week — there is something dystopian about using an AI app to generate fake vacation photos of yourself. And yet, here we are. Product designer Laurent Del Rey, who recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, launched a side project called Endless Summer, a photobooth app for iPhone that creates AI-generated vacation photos starring you in locations around the world. Here you are exploring a beach town, or overlooking a European city from your balcony. There you are, out shopping, having dinner with friends, or at a social gathering. It doesn’t look like anyone in these photos is talking about AI or entrepreneurship or a lack of sleep. As Del Rey explained when sharing the launch on X, the new app is for when “burnout hits and you need to manifest the soft life u deserve.” (When you can’t live life, you may as well fake it, right?) The product designer told TechCrunch that he was inspired to create the app because summer is his favorite season, and he loves how life feels during that time of the year. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 “As the season ends, I wanted to make something that felt like that. It’s from that feeling that I reverse-engineered the product experience,” he says. “I created an Xcode project and started iterating directly from there, sculpting the code experience, so to speak.” The experience he landed on was a simple user interface where there’s a tiny camera preview button at the bottom of the screen. You tap the button to make an AI-generated “summer” photo. As you click, the photos appear on your screen, in a sort of camera roll-style view. Each photo features you, or rather an AI version of you, exploring the world and looking fairly content while doing so. Behind the scenes, Gemini’s Nano-Banana image-model is doing the heavy lifting, as the app prompts the model for different...