Most of the time, building a React UI with Material-UI looks like this: open the docs, copy a <Button variant="contained" color="primary">…</Button> , paste it into your component, tweak props, save, alt-tab to the browser, reload, repeat. It works — but for sketching layouts or onboarding new developers to MUI's prop surface, the loop is heavier than it needs to be. Bombie is an experiment in shortening that loop. It's a drag-and-drop visual builder for Material-UI in React. You drop components onto a canvas, edit their props through a grouped property dialog, preview the result at mobile, tablet, or desktop widths, and the whole UI is serialized as a JSON tree under the hood. You can try it right now without cloning anything: bombie-three.vercel.app . This post is the first in a series. Here I'll cover what Bombie does, who it's for, and the design ideas behind it. Later posts will go into the architecture, how to add a new component in five small edits, and the lessons I picked up shipping it.…