There's an intriguing comment here wrt anonymous records: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records/OverloadedRecordFields/ MagicClasses#Designextension:anonymousrecords (End of the section) "... this doesn't quite work, because the two instances overlap, but it is possible with a bit more trickery" I could well understand if everybody's forgotten what was the "trickery", because ORF has been so long in the pipeline, but could anyone explain? Reason for the q: I'm looking at anonymous records myself, including extending, shortening and joining anon records. And yes overlapping instances are everywhere. Using type families isn't being too ergonomic. And I notice ORF has used FunDeps. But for me, FunDeps in the HList style is also rather ugly. Is there some trickery I'm missing? Thanks AntC