* automate things in your daily life :- I spend sometime in office downloading many kinds of log file and analyzing it. So, I just built a small qt GUI that behaves like a MC clone in windows. It's not very nice looking, but improves day by day.
* hobby to useful apps :- like visitinh hackenews frequently, so make a GUI client for hn.
No matter what you do, if the requirement is not clear, you won't be able to finish it. If no one uses it, it will be useless and disapper into the crowd.
AI won't make coders unemployed. It will simply create a new type of job, like tensor flow programmers. This is same as C++ programmers who some way generate assembly code by using a tool called compiler.
A small scale means you won't use redis for in memory data storage. You will not need C++ to write heavy string processing and hash table lookup. Golang also doesn't scale well if you have some heavy processing involving trees(http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/binarytrees.htm...).