Does the description disclose side effects, auth requirements, rate limits, or destructive behavior?
Annotations only declare readOnlyHint and openWorldHint; the description adds real behavioral detail beyond them: ambiguous names are refused with candidate ids, reference lists are capped at 50 edges, referenceCounts supplies totals, and list_references is the escape hatch for the rest. That is exactly the extra context an agent needs to interpret a truncated result.
Agents need to know what a tool does to the world before calling it. Descriptions should go beyond structured annotations to explain consequences.