The Lombok Illusion (Chapter 5)

You open a new Spring Boot project and you create a DTO, then an entity, and you’re staring at getters, setters, constructors, equals() , hashCode() , toString() . Someone on the team suggests to put lombok’s @Data , or “just slap @Builder on it, it’ll be cleaner.” Forty lines become five and it looks great in the PR. Then it hits a real codebase, OpenAPI generation doesn't behave the way the build expects. Hibernate meets an auto-generated equals() and gets confused about identity. Something throws through a generated builder hierarchy at 2 AM, and the method you need to inspect doesn't exist in any file you can open. Eleven years into enterprise Java, my rule is simple: Lombok doesn't touch core application behavior. Not because writing a getter is interesting - it isn't, but because the handful of lines it saves rarely covers the compiler magic, tooling friction, and debugging problems it adds to something that has to survive for years after you've moved on to another project. "It just removes boilerplate" Worth asking what's actually being removed, though. A getter is part of your public API. A setter is a mutation point someone decided to expose. A constructor defines what states an object is allowed to enter. equals() and hashCode() define identity. toString() is what shows up in your logs when things go wrong at 3 AM. Write those by hand and they live in the source - visible, searchable, debuggable, owned by whoever's reading the file. Generate them with Lombok and the behavior is still there, it's just moved somewhere you can't see it without a separate step. The annotation most people reach for first time is @Data : @Data @Entity public class CustomerEntity { @Id @GeneratedValue private Long id ; private String email ; @OneToMany ( mappedBy = "customer" ) private List < OrderEntity > orders ; } One line and you get getters, setters, toString() , equals() , hashCode() across every field. For a JPA entity that's already a problem before you've written any bus