To answer my question myself I gave Microsoft copilot this prompt:
I want you to rewrite this headline "Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks"
into something a little humorous and snarky that reveals the underlying truth that would bring a
wry smile to tech-engaged but big tech-skeptical hacker news readers.
This has to fit in the 80 character limit for Hacker News so keep it appropriately short.
Also I want you to reply with exactly one headline and not anything else so I can use your output
as part of a processing pipeline
and i get the response Amazon Finally Remembers eBooks Aren’t Supposed to Be Prisoners
which I think is great. I started with the first paragraph and got something too long with some explanation. I added the second, and got three replies and more explanation. The three replies were all "good enough" in my mind but added the third paragraph to control the output.
I prompted Gemini to tell me how to prompt itself to get similar results on other news sites and it said I should give it a description of the intended audience and what it finds funny/snarky.
Which looks like what you did.