Still fundamentally manipulating SQL text (which is a feature as I don't want to learn a full DSL), but it handles wrangling embedded placeholders while you're composing stuff and some other common compositional tasks. It's worked well for me anyway but I'm under no illusions it'd be right for everyone.

Not an original concept regardless; my original version of this was in Node: https://github.com/bdowning/sql-assassin, but a few years after I wrote that (and mostly didn't use it) I found https://github.com/gajus/slonik which was very similar and much more fleshed-out; I rolled _some_ of its concepts and patterns into sql-athame.