The Invisible Product Pictures

Of all the things that nearly made me close the laptop and go make coffee with an attitude, the product images were the one.

This was June 2, the same day I had asked the AI to build what was probably a wildly overstuffed first version of Beads of Hope T1D. Shop, checkout, community, login, the whole parade. Somehow, in about 20 minutes, it had made the bones of a real site.

So that evening I thought I was moving into the “make it pretty” part.

That was optimistic.

The shop page was there. The products were there. The categories were there. But the product photos — the actual bracelets, badge reels, pens, the handmade things that were the whole point — were invisible on the published site.

Not missing in a clean way, either. It wasn’t like a neat little broken image icon saying, “Hello, I am your problem.” It was just empty space where the picture should have been.

And when I clicked that empty box, the page snapped back to the top of the “all” category.

Every time.

So I’d scroll down, see the blank area, click where the image should be, and boom — back to the top. Like the site was scolding me.

On top of that, duplicate category buttons kept showing up. I was trying to build a calm, hopeful little shop for Type 1 Diabetes awareness, and instead it felt like the page had a nervous twitch.

At one point I told the AI, exactly as plainly as I could: “images are still not visible and each time I click on the box the image should be in, the screen immediately reverts back to the top.”

That sentence may not sound dramatic, but I promise there was steam behind it.

The fixes started coming. The AI would say it found the issue, change something, and I’d publish or preview again with hope in my heart.

Still blank.

Then another fix.

Still blank.

Then the jumping-to-the-top thing would still happen.

Then the duplicate categories would still be sitting there, looking smug.

This went on for hours. Not five minutes. Not a cute little “oops.” Hours. I did not understand enough to know whether the problem was the images, the page, the database, the categories, or some secret fourth thing hiding behind all of it.

Then I saw an error that might as well have been written in ancient cave markings:

“Cannot find module '@/assets/blue-ribbon.png.asset.json'”

I had no idea what an asset.json was. None. I knew what a blue ribbon was. I knew what a PNG image was, sort of. But “asset dot json” sounded like something I had accidentally agreed to in a software hostage negotiation.

Eventually the AI explained it in normal-person language: it was basically a pointer file for an image. A little behind-the-scenes file that tells the app where the image is and how to use it.

That helped. I still didn’t love it, but at least it stopped sounding like a robot sneeze.

The AI regenerated the missing pointer file and kept untangling the image and category behavior. I wish I could say I calmly observed this process like a patient learner. I did not. I refreshed the page too many times. I doubted the whole project. I wondered why I had asked for an ecommerce site when I still occasionally lose files on my own computer.

And then, finally, the images showed up.

The shop page looked like a shop. The products were visible. The clicking worked. The page stopped flinging me back to the top like an amusement park ride I had not consented to.

It was such a small thing on the surface: product pictures appearing where product pictures are supposed to appear.

But for me, that was one of the first moments this stopped feeling like a demo and started feeling like a real store. A real store for a real cause, tied to my real kid, who was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes when he was two.

That’s probably why the bug got to me so badly. It wasn’t just “images won’t load.” It was: the thing I’m trying to make for him is broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.

What I learned: sometimes the bug that breaks you is also the one that teaches you the system is fixable.