Probably because I don't use Eclipse ;) I like *Builder classes from commons-lang myself because they're IDE agnostic, clear, flexible, and reasonably performant. We've used them other places, so it seemed natural. I'm open to alternatives like Eclipse or other auto-generated tools, but it seems wise to standardize on something. Presumably IntelliJ has a similar generation feature, but I wonder whether it would be similar. Could you provide an example and I'll look into the IntelliJ support?