CONCEPT
Directional Affordance
The class of affordances — specification, iteration, composition, questioning — that emerged in the AI-augmented environment and that shift the builder's perceptual engagement from the mechanics of how to the strategy of what.
When AI handles the terrain of implementation — syntax, dependencies, error diagnosis — the builder's perceptual bandwidth is freed for what Gibson's analysis of locomotion calls destination information: the path through the problem space, the strategic affordances, the architectural possibilities. Directional affordances are the new action possibilities that emerged in the AI-augmented environment: the specification affordance (direct description of outcomes in natural language), the iteration affordance (rapid conversational refinement), the compositional affordance (system-level assembly of components), the cross-domain affordance (productive engagement across specialties), the collaborative perception affordance (emergent insight from human-machine conversation). Each represents a genuine ecological gain — possibilities that did not exist in the pre-AI environment. Each also presupposes a perceptual foundation that implementation affordances built, producing the ecological asymmetry at the heart of the AI transition: directional affordances are most valuable to the builders whose perceptual systems were shaped by the affordances they replace.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gibson's analysis of locomotion distinguished two