Well.. autodiff isn't particularly technically sophisticated. But I doubt that when it was first invented in the 1950s, people could have foreseen that a lot of autodiff put together can write an implementation of autodiff.

If you're interested in more technical approaches, I think they're starting to come together, slowly. I've seen several research directions (operads / cellular sheaves for a theory of multiagent collaboration, the theory of open games for compositional forwards/backwards strategy/planning in open environments) that would fit in quite nicely. And to some extent, the earliest frameworks are going to be naive implementations of these directions.