Thanks, that is definitely a downside to the shift operator overloading approach. I'll take that onboard and investigate whether a single operator to handle both would mesh with the current design.

You can just use the boost.pfr technique to iterate fields though. Or if you want, starting from C++26 and e.g. clang-21: https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/G1TqP3a8P

    #include <print>
    #include <type_traits>
    
    namespace hexi {
      struct streamer { };
    
      template<typename T>
      void operator<<(streamer& s, const T& e) {
        if constexpr(std::is_integral_v<T>) {
          std::println("number: {}", e);
        } else if constexpr(std::is_aggregate_v<T>) {
          auto& [...mems] = e;
          (std::println("member: {}", mems), ...);
        }
      }
    }
    
    struct user_type {
        int x;
        std::string y;
    };
    
    int main() {
        hexi::streamer s;
        s << 123;
        s << user_type{.x = 456, .y = "foo"};
    }

or with boost.pfr as a polyfill until then, which allows to do this back to C++14

like boost serialize, which overloads the & operator

Thanks again for this comment. Consider Cereal copied, now only a single function is required.