So what do you use to know if you need to build it yourself or if there is already something out there? Niot being able to find a tool for the problem does not mean it doesn't exist, just that you haven't found it. Especially when you lack the familiarity with the problem to know the correct keywords.

I find ChatGPT to be of great help to explore the area, find relevant keywords or the name of the research domain. Sometimes you really need to know exactly what you are looking for before you can find the link to that one super helpful github library that solves you problem. The of course the next step is figuring out if you want to take on the dependency or not...

I have wasted hours searching for an (analytical) inverse kinematics library for robotic arms. There are tons of slow non analytical libraries out there, and some horrible ones like ikfast that is a effectively a code generator that spits out c that can be compiled with python bindings. I eventually did find https://github.com/Jmeyer1292/opw_kinematics, which someone ported rust (for which it was easy to create python bindings).