I think what we're getting here is a way to just spin up a local shell / app and run arbitrary queries from any point in time over the network without having to sync the full prod database. I guess with LiteFS you would have to do this, or pre-plan to do this, it's not totally on-demand.
Or said another way, do things locally as though in prod without having to ssh to prod and do it there (if you even can, I guess if 'prod' is just s3 you can't really do this anyway so it's an entirely new capability).
@benbjohnson is this right? I humbly suggest adding a tl;dr of the main takeaway up top of the post to clarify. Love your work on litestream, thanks for what you do!
One reason you're not getting such a clear usage statement at the top of this post is, it's an early feature for a general-purpose capability. I think we might rather get other people's takes about what it's most useful for? There are some obvious use cases, like the one you just identified.