I love AWS Amplify, however, I love using the CDK for managing my resources more!
Here is a blog post on some of how I set everything up
When using DataStore without Amplify the amplify codegen models utility doesn't work due to being unable to find the api without some slight modifications to the Amplify config.
This utility uses the amplify-codegen-appsync-model-plugin to generate proper Amplify DataStore models from a schema.
This assumes you have outputs from the CDK for the values you need. Grabs those from your cloudformation stack and creates and aws-exports.js file in your src/ directory
Uses amplify-graphql-docs-generator to generate GraphQL queries, mutations, & subscriptions into typescript
Uses graphql-codegen-core and the typescript plugin to generate typescript types for the application if you are not using the DataStore