I am trying to complete a codepipeline with the cloudformation service and this error is generated. It must be said that the separate cloudformation service works well. The complete error is:

JobFailed
Requires capabilities: [CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND] (Service: AmazonCloudFormation; Status Code: 400; Error Code: InsufficientCapabilitiesException; Request ID: 1a977102-f829-11e8-b5c6-f7cc8454c4d0)

The solutions I have is to add the CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND --capabilities parameter but that only applies to CLI and my case is by web console.

Ran into the same problem, I could not find a way to do it through the console.
However it works well with the CLI and you can find detailed documentation on pipeline update here : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/codepipeline/update-pipeline.html

The way I did it was :

1. make a get-pipeline to get the current pipeline structure
2. save the result as a json file
3. from the json file : remove the metadata section, add a capabilities attribute with your value in configuration section
4. use the update-pipeline command with –cli-input-json option specifying the previous json file