Yes. Sometimes when I feel stuck or paralyzed, I like to just fiddle with the existing code, refactoring here and there to do some obvious albeit small improvements. This entrances me into a little "flow" experience, and suddenly some bigger and more interesting opportunities emerge spontaneously. That's when I get really inspired and make a lot of progress.
Sometimes it's good to walk away, as in literally take a walk and utterly ignore all your problems, and sometimes it's good to chip away, as in doing one little easy thing that's within your immediate power, however meaningless it might seem. I find that such small efforts produce a sort of "compound interest" effect, where your gains start to pile up faster than you expect.
Thanks this is a really interesting take. I had already tried the "walk away" approach, for more than a month, but coming back to it seems completely overwhelming. I like this idea because I think I get what it's doing: it's reminding you of all the parts bit by bit, and allowing your mind to re learn re think, and rebuild the project in your head, and it's also a utilitarian task meaning that you're not thinking (stressing) about solving something that is already solved.
Complementary advice: while you rebuild the outlines in your head again, re-evaluate your old decisions about what really needs to be there.
If your overall vision is too solidified in your head, there may be some minor decisions that were a good idea at the time ("well if we're already doing X, it's easy to also give them Y!"), but now that you're down in the muck they are complicating things far more than you imagined.
Sometimes you can just drop a few things you actually don't need (but have become fixed in your vision though habit), ...and dependencies start collapsing, and the whole thing takes on a new shape.
Also: don't overlook temporary solutions.
You can often fix a dependency with a cheap hack that obviously won't scale in the long run... but it gets you over the hump, and you'll be able to replace it with the real solution down the road.
What has happened is that you have lost the overview, cleaning up your code will restore that.