In my experience, the deepseek-coder-instruct family is at least as good as gpt-3.5-turbo on python. Even the 1.3b models are very good (and run okay on cpu), although you should use larger if you have the vram. There are even larger models (30b+) if you are drowning in vram, but I don't think they perform much better at coding than deepseek-coder-instruct 6.7b.

3-4gb vram or cpu (1.3b): https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-1.3b-instruct...

Alternative for chat (1.3b): https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/evolvedSeeker_1_3-GGUF

Alternative for chat (3b): https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/open-llama-3b-v2-wizard-evol...

6-8gb vram (6.7b): https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-instruct...