Practice — MCP and Tool Integration Protocols (5 questions)

Your team's agent needs to look up customer records in an internal CRM. A teammate proposes writing a single function — get_customer(id) — that calls the CRM's REST API directly and returns JSON, wired straight into your app's function-calling setup. Someone else says "we should build this as an MCP server instead."

1. What questions would you ask before picking a side?
2. Walk through how the answers to those questions point you toward MCP or toward the bespoke function.
3. Suppose you build the bespoke function today, and six months later a second team wants the same CRM access. What would you do, and is that outcome evidence the original bespoke decision was wrong?