Just a thinking-out-loud madness here, but to take mez to
the next level:

Make a primitive debugger, really just to stop execution
at the entry point address. Here's a starting point:

https://blog.tartanllama.xyz/writing-a-linux-debugger-setup/

And try out this ptrace wrapper:

https://github.com/micahswitzer/zig-ptrace

Write the tiniest bit of a disassembler that expects and
recognizes ONLY my test program(s). :-)