Writing sql by hand doesn't have to mean you abandon things like autocomplete and automatic highlighting of typo's. SQL can be inspected by a proper ide just like any other language.
To be fair, SQL has a syntax that is hard to provide (for example) autocompletion for, as the table comes after the fields, and the field names can be ambiguous.
Postgresql command line (psql) still manage to do an excellent job at it (but I concede it's pretty hard to replicate)