The Bigger Context: Getting Real Work Done with Claude AI and Context Engineering

Most people get a fraction of what Claude AI can do, and they blame the AI. The real problem is context.

The difference between people who get generic, forgettable answers from Claude and people who get extraordinary, genuinely useful work is not a clever prompt or a secret trick. It is how well they give the AI what it needs to help them. That skill has a name, context engineering, and this is the book that teaches it in plain English, from your very first try to running whole projects across your work and your life.

Written by Randy Chia, who teaches this craft to professionals across finance, film, writing, and education, The Bigger Context is the rare Claude guide that is accurate, genuinely practical, and built for real people instead of programmers. You bring one real task, and you build it, hands on, across the book, until you can do this on your own with anything.

By the end, you will be able to:

• Get a genuinely useful result from Claude on day one, even if you have never used it
• Set up Projects, Files, and Memory so Claude actually understands your work
• Teach Claude your recurring jobs with Skills, and connect it to the tools you already use
• Hand whole multi-step jobs to Cowork and supervise them, with no code required
• Use Claude for writing, research, numbers, and learning, without losing your own judgment
• Know when to trust it, when to verify it, and what to never hand it
• Apply ready-made playbooks for teachers, analysts, business owners, creators, parents, and retirees

This is not a book of disposable screenshots that are stale before you finish reading. It is the durable skill underneath every feature, the one that only grows more valuable as the tools improve, and it carries over to any capable AI assistant you use.

Stop chasing tricks. Learn the one thing that changes everything, and put it to work tomorrow.