Ask for help. Slack and discord channels are ok. StackOverflow is ok. A senior dev on your team is better. If you don't work with someone who seems like gandal

Ask for help. Slack and discord channels are ok. StackOverflow is ok. A senior dev on your team is better. If you don't work with someone who seems like gandalf had he gotten into graph theory, consider switching jobs. Working with talented people really pours gasoline on your career. Also consider a mindset switch. The choice of the word powerless is interesting here. There are modes of thinking you can get into where you just want to get to "fixed" or "done". In my experience that mindset makes problems harder to solve. I would encourage instead a kind of eccentric puzzler mindset. Instead of thinking in terms of the dread of explaining to your boss the problem still isn't done, think about it as another day at the puzzle factory. The way you become gandalf by the way. Is by working really hard on the seemingly impossible puzzles. Always going deeper, reading books, asking experts, developing patience. What takes weeks today will take seconds tomorrow and some of those lessons will cross apply to problems in future software that does not exist yet.