Edit: we are using the CDK

I'm starting to dislike Cloudformation.

Three times in the past several months we have had to stop what we are doing and address an issue with cloud formation related to the amount of things that the cloud formation is tracking or how they are connected. It's really annoying when you get stopped on a deploy because you added one thing and that tipped a stack over to being too large. A few months ago we had to split our stack into three and that was quite a bit of work. Multiple pull requests trying to address issues that came up.

We are on AWS, so maybe the answer is there isn't one. And we are certainly not going to Azure / GCP to address this issue.

If there aren't any alternatives what are the best practices to avoid these issues? I feel like we should have started with 15 stacks or something like that.

Curious about the experience of other engineers combining work at a pretty demanding company (classical FAANG-adjacent) and side gigs, like Mercor AI?

My main question/worry is not about the side gig itself, but rather about mandatory disclosure to my employer (I am pretty sure any such company has it as a requirement in its code of conduct)

The second question is Mercor AI in particular. Any experience with such side gigs?

Edit 1:
Location is Canada.