"Well, you could have come up with advance ideas and stuff before you actually worked on it."

"It's a little like the microwave, if I have an idea it's weird not to at least fully design it."

"Oh. Hmm, does designing include actually implementing it?"

"No, drawing it up will do, but there's some ambiguity about ownership of things like that."

"But in that case the PRT doesn't need to actually know about it, do they?"

"I'm not sure what the advantage would be to advance design of things I shouldn't build yet, even if we assume it's a great idea to conceal designs from them."

"Well, if you design things now you'll be able to expand on it or scrap it if you decide it's no good and in general have the idea-having part done by the time you graduate. Saves time."

"I usually don't revise designs until I've tried them in practice."

"Okay, so not as timesaving as possible, but still saves some."

"Only in the long run, and I have more on my plate right now than I expect to as an independent tycoon who can finally let her software do all the work."

"Tycoon?"

"I will get a loan, the bot will run a cookie cutter MMORPG with the best moderation and NPC dialogue in the world, and I will be rich."

"...if you could figure out a way to make non-tinker VR helmets or help other people develop that you'd have the single best game in the history of ever."

"That's part of the plan! I think I can get rich even if I don't pull that off though."

"I think I'm gonna want to play it, too. Fighting critters without anyone's actual, real butt on the line is probably way more fun."

"Plus you'll get XP instead of a vague hard-to-quantify increase in how much you have practiced individual skills."

"How are you gonna VR physical skills, though?"

"I mean, it'd be helmets plus controls, I'd have to get really fancy and probably charge a lot of money for something more immersive. Might do it if I had a good idea and there was market."

"Oh, there's market. You might accidentally remove a chunk of the population from the species' genotype, but there's market."

"I'm not sure if this market would hold up to having to physically move around to use their rig."

"If it was immersive enough maybe they wouldn't need to."

"...Thaaaat might require brain surgery."

"Would it, though? I'm not sure how sci-fi we're speaking here but if the VR equipment in question could actually read this kind of brain command..."

"We're veering out of my specialty there. I mean, maybe if I modified the design for my implants, but it'd still be surgical."

"I suppose. And in any case it couldn't be you who made the individual pieces or the tinker curse would break them."