@luxbock just noticed your question

yes there is, it's this:

(transform (subselect (multi-path FIRST LAST))
  (fn [[a b]] (if (> a b) [(str a) b] [a (str b)]))
  [1 2 3])
;; => [1 2 "3"]

Ah that's great, I will try to see if it works for my original use case