I'm farther from an expert than you. I tried (and failed) to find a less confusing way... One thing I see people doing when they have real gnarly type signatur

I'm farther from an expert than you. I tried (and failed) to find a less confusing way... One thing I see people doing when they have real gnarly type signature is to concentrate the horror in one place and paint a veneer of simplicity elsewhere: type Get stateType returnType = forall monad. (SpockState monad ~ stateType, MonadIO monad, HasSpock monad) => monad returnType Then elsewhere: getBlockChain :: Get BlockChainState [Block] getLatestBlock :: Get BlockChainState Block This may only help superficially as type errors will still be hard-to-understand.