a UI catalogue can serve coding agents without becoming a component library

tech · 2026-11-02 · 4 min

finding a component is not the same as choosing one. a search result can save time only if you can also check where the code came from, what licence it carries and what it needs to run.

EneUI is my project: a catalogue of UI components, blocks and icons, searchable on the web and through MCP. its pages expose metadata such as source and licence instead of treating a preview as enough information to copy code into a product.

the job is discovery

UI examples live across libraries, repositories and documentation sites. looking for a specific interaction often means opening several tabs, comparing similar snippets and then tracing the original source. when a coding agent does that work, the same missing context becomes more important: it can find code quickly and still choose code that does not fit.

EneUI's current catalogue is indexed from public sources. the site presents a component alongside its source, licence, dependencies and installation information. a developer can browse the catalogue directly; an agent can query it through the MCP connection. the goal is to make the answer inspectable before it is pasted into a codebase.

a catalogue is not a framework

i did not want the first step to be adding another UI runtime or adopting a new component API. the useful unit here is the source you can review and adapt in your own project. that is a product choice: discovery should not force you to switch frameworks or add EneUI as a dependency.

the trade-off is that a catalogue cannot guarantee the result will fit. a component can be written for a different stack, depend on packages you do not use, or need changes to meet your accessibility and design requirements. metadata helps you make that decision; it does not make it for you.

what still needs a human

check the original source and licence before shipping anything. then read the component itself: a preview cannot tell you whether keyboard interaction, responsive behaviour or your project's conventions are handled well. an agent can shorten the search, but it cannot take responsibility for those choices.

that is the distinction i want EneUI to preserve. it is a map to code, not a promise that every result is production-ready. if the catalogue makes discovery faster while keeping provenance visible, it has done its job. the final decision still belongs to the person maintaining the application.