Something is definitely wrong when working with monorepos

Describe the bug

Hi everyone! Thanks a lot for this package and for all the work you’re doing in general!

Somewhere after the 17.36.2 update, something went wrong with monorepos. There was already a separate issue created for this (https://github.com/netlify/cli/issues/6841), and it even looked like it was fixed – but in reality, it took me quite a while to figure out that something is still clearly off.

Steps to reproduce

Let's try deploying the site using the following command, which used to work perfectly back around version 17:

netlify deploy --prod --site whatislove-b --filter packages/whatislove-b --dir packages/whatislove-b/build

Don't pay attention to the project names or anything like that – just treat this as an example.

We'll get an error that tells us to run netlify status. And when we do that, we get another error as well.

But you know what's interesting... If we try to deploy the site using the site ID instead of the site name, everything works perfectly – and we don’t see any "not found" error at all.

netlify deploy --prod --site 12fd... --filter packages/whatislove-b --dir packages/whatislove-b/build

But also, if we use the site name as the identifier and add the --no-build flag, everything works perfectly as well.

netlify deploy --prod --no-build --site whatislove-b --filter packages/whatislove-b --dir packages/whatislove-b/build

I kind of understand why this might be happening – working with workspaces is no simple matter. But I think it's definitely worth improving the error messages you get when dealing with them, because right now they're actually making things even more confusing.

Configuration

No response

Environment

When I run netlify -V, I get:

netlify-cli/23.10.0 darwin-arm64 node-v24.11.0

Start by reproducing the reported commands with netlify deploy and netlify status, comparing a site name with a site ID and the effect of --no-build. Trace the monorepo and workspace handling involved in --filter, --site, and --dir; done means the name-based deployment no longer produces the misleading errors or clearly explains the remaining failure.