When should you use @Lazy, and what are its trade-offs?

Use @Lazy when a bean is expensive to create but rarely actually used, deferring its cost until the first real request for it, or to break specific circular-dependency deadlocks where eager initialization would otherwise fail. The trade-off: lazy beans move a configuration failure from a predictable, fail-fast point at application startup to an unpredictable point during request handling — most teams reserve @Lazy for genuinely optional or costly beans rather than applying it broadly, since it trades startup safety for startup speed.