ByteBuddy is still the "expiremental" (or incubating) BytecodeProvider atm. Starting in 6.0 we plan to make it the default over Javassist (see HHH-11253 Open ). But atm we purposefully leave it off any transitive dependencies, including the Karaf descriptor. If you want to use the ByteBuddy BytecodeProvider pre-6.0 you will need to add the ByteBuddy dependencies yourself.