I've had reasonably good results with deepseek 6.7b

It struggles and hallucinates once you get into more niche languages, but it'll spit out a snake in Python or write file io functions pretty well - I've used it to read/write huge json in a buffer with good results.

I haven't tried gpt4, but compared to 3.5 it's pretty great

I have gpt4 with copilot at work so i mostly use that, it is pretty good for programming, you see its limitations when you start relying on it a lot on autocompletions, maybe because the code itself is not too coherent and gpt gets confused

Maybe chat tasks are simpler because it writes the whole thing from scratch, though I mostly ask it for limited functionalities, eg write a function that takes x and returns y or use a certain ORM to change a value.

I would suggest you try both gpt 3.5 and the free huggingface minstral 7b version (you can probably run it on pc too, it's not huge) for programming tasks and see for yourself. For general knowledge though, gpt wins hands down over minsral 7b