Hooo boy where do I begin? Dependency deadlocks are the big one - you try to share resource attributes (eg ARN) from one stack to another. You remove the consumer and go to deploy again. The producer sees no more dependency so it prunes the export. But it can't delete the export, cause the consumer still needs it. You can't deploy the consumer, because the producer has to deploy first sequentially. And if you can't delete the consumer (eg your company mandates a CI pipeline deploy for everything) you gotta go bug Ops on slack, wait for someone who has the right perms to delete it, then redeploy.

You can't actually read real values from Parameters/exports (you get a token placeholder) so you can't store JSON then read it back and decode (unless in same stack, which is almost pointless). You can do some hacks with Fn:: though.

Deploying certain resources that have names specified (vs generated) often breaks because it has to create the new resource before destroying the old one, which it can't, because the name conflicts (it's the same name...cause it's the same construct).

It's wildly powerful though, which is great. But we have basically had to create our own internal library to solve what should be non-problems in an IaC system.

Would be hilarious if my coworker stumbled upon this. I know he reads hn and this has been my absolute crusade this quarter.

I'll just echo the other poster with "deadlocks". It's obscene how slow CF is, and the fact that its failure modes often leave you in a state that feels extremely dangerous. I've had to contact AWS Support before due to CF locking up in an irrecoverable way due to cycles.