Why IntelliJ needs Lombok plugin?

Question

As far as I understand, Lombok uses Java\'s Annotation Processors to generate additional methods.

With Maven 3.5 it works perfectly without adding any additional con

Answer 1

Ale IDEs use lombok plugin be it intelij-idea or eclipse. javac works fine with it - but remember that it works when for example you build you project with mvn clean package. Then when you have your IDE - it works differntly - the code is not processed like in build task.

The plugin make it know to IDE what is this annotation and what code it generates underhood without need of javac.