Goggle-fu - I like that. It should go on my resume.
Still as I wrote on one of the other replies. Yes, you use an API, but you still provide evidence of coding, because you have to write the application, which calls the API.
It was a small piece of code, which took a number from the command line and spat out in the other format. You still have to know everything else to get it to work. Reading input, writing output, etc...
Only in the most literal sense. The developer who thinks that their job only consists of translating very precise literal instructions to another set of precise instructions will very soon be out of work. That is a thing that is easy to automate. The developer's value lays in being able to translate vague and very context dependent instructions to precise instructions. This guy clearly failed at this.
He should have been able to figure that out before the test. It was a test of his problem solving abilities, not his Google-fu.