Why Lombok Fails After an IDEA Upgrade and How to Fix It

After upgrading IntelliJ IDEA, many users encounter Lombok annotations not being processed, resulting in compilation errors such as “cannot find symbol log”. The IDE also warns that the current compiler does not support Lombok.

The root cause is the IDEA version; updating Lombok to 1.18.14 or later resolves the issue. For Maven projects add the following dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.projectlombok</groupId>
  <artifactId>lombok</artifactId>
  <version>1.18.14</version>
  <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

If you use Spring Boot, the Lombok version is managed automatically; older Spring Boot versions (e.g., 2.1.3) may still bring an older Lombok (1.18.6) that causes the problem.

Additional troubleshooting steps:

Ensure the Lombok plugin is installed and enabled.

In Settings → Build, Execution, Deployment → Compiler → Annotation Processors, check “Enable annotation processing”.

Add the JVM option -Djps.track.ap.dependencies=false to the compiler configuration.