alt Hacker NewsFor the purposes of debugging, assembly is machine code, just with some nice constructs to make it easier to read. Transpiling between assembly and machine code is mostly a find-and-replace exercise, not like the advanced reasoning involved in proper compilation.
On x86/x64/variable instruction length architectures this isn't always the case. You can jump in middle of an instruction to get a different instruction. It can be used to obfuscate code.