The x86 instruction set is insanely complicated due to decades of history, but that’s exactly what drew me in, personally. Over a few years of diving more and more into the architecture, I’ve become somewhat fascinated by it. Despite all history, there’s still some interesting patterns that can be uncovered in the bit representations.

A nice exercise that’s helped me a lot is to write a very simple program in assembly, look at the output, and see how it all pieces together. Even random instructions that make no sense other than to see how it’s turned into machine code.