Hi @bombillazo You're asking a great question — right now, with tasks in Turborepo don't automatically receive the CLI flags (like --filter) passed to the parent task.

What's happening

When you define:

"dev": {
  "with": ["//#watch"]
}

The watch task gets triggered internally, but Turbo doesn't forward any CLI args like --filter or --force to that task by default.

Workaround 1: Use a wrapper script

Instead of relying purely on with, you can create a small wrapper task or script that forwards process.argv:

Example in your package.json:

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "node ./scripts/dev.js"
  }
}

Then in scripts/dev.js:

const { execSync } = require("child_process");

const args = process.argv.slice(2).join(" ");
execSync(`turbo run //#watch --filter=${args}`, { stdio: "inherit" });

Now you can call:

npm run dev -- my-package

And it will forward the filter to your custom task.

Workaround 2: Define scoped tasks per package

If you consistently need to run watch in a filtered context, define tasks in each package like:

{
  "scripts": {
    "watch": "node scripts/watch.js"
  }
}

Then run:

turbo run watch --filter=my-package

This keeps your filters at the CLI level, avoids the limitations of with, and gives you better cache separation.

TL;DR

Currently, Turbo’s with array is static and doesn’t support dynamic CLI arg forwarding. If this is a critical feature for your workflow, I’d suggest opening a feature request for argument propagation through with.

Let me know if you want help writing that up — it would be a very useful addition to Turborepo’s task system.