Thanks for getting back to me (you too @Dreadmask197).
Playground is going to be super handy. It’s funny, I ran across it but never connected that I could be doing the designing in playground. Probably because I spend so much time in vscode that it didn’t feel like a web-editor would suffice. 
I did try the getting-started guide with vscode but ran into a snag with pxt (Getting started with a pxt extension for micro:bit). I was digging through the dependencies looking for which one had a typo in the package.json but decided I could just as easily manually define the pxt config files (which I did and moved on).
But, it was frustrating not having the types in vscode which would probably be addressed if pxt would’ve worked. I’ll bet I just need to reference https://www.npmjs.com/package/pxt-microbit and I may just need to point to some of the definition files in my tsconfig. I’ll go give that a shot and then report back here . . . for posterity. 