This is quite incredible. The stylistic similarities of generated Shakespearean saga, Linux code etc was quite startling. Perhaps we can train a Haiku/Fortune cookie generator which could occasionally be quite profound.
People are always worried about "computers taking factory jobs" resulting in mass unemployment, but the truth is, a rudimentary AI with acceptance tests on output will obsolete every programmer alive.
Hell, half the programming people do these days is just gluing APIs together then seeing if it actually works. It doesn't take 16 years of rich inner human life experience to accomplish that, just exhaustive combinational parameter searching on the subset of API interactions you're interested in evaluating.
I'm all for it, it's going to be a productivity gain. It's like going from a manual screwdriver to a motorized one.
With ngrams, Markov models are perfectly sufficient. With individual characters, complex concepts need to be remembered across many, many characters of input.