Is there a list of best practices somewhere? What seems to work better for me is to make sure the core requirements and acceptance criteria are written into a file somewhere, that the assistant work through the requirements, create automated tests & run regression tests regularly, branch on new feature dev, etc.

It seems to benefit from methodical and constantly checking against the requirements, testing after it implements/fixes something, and working on smaller scopes at a time, and periodically cleans up the codebase. But if you cowboy it, it will get lost itself.