Lombok should be used at the provided
scope (see the official docs).
The reason (as has been stated in the comments) is that lombok is a compile-time-only tool. That is, it is not needed at runtime at all. By making the scope provided
, you make the lombok libraries available to the compiler but it is not a dependency of your compiled jar. As such, your final jar will not depend on Lombok and it does not need to be included in any deployment, which reduces the dependencies and size of your deployables.